From an early age, in the early 1930s, he studied at the the Higher School of Industrial arts in Stockholm, where his tutors advised him to move to Paris to further his artistic education. In 1935 he began studying at the Académie Scandinave, a Swedish Artists’ community based in Maison Watteau that had been founded to introduce Swedish artists to French art. When it closed in 1935 he moved to the atelier of the social realist painter Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971) before attending Stanley William Hayter's first printmaking studio, Atelier Dix-Sept.
He returned to Sweden and in 1946 began studies in graphic arts at the Konsthögskolan in Stockholm and in 1953 became Harald Arthur Sallberg's (1895-1963) teaching assistant at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Von Konow had retained his connection to Hayter’s Atelier 17 and was strongly influenced by his printing techniques, after the publication of Hayter’s A New Way of Deep-Printing (1949), Konow returned to Sweden and published his own handbook On Graphics: History and Technology (1956); to this day considered an important contribution to the teachings of graphic design and printmaking in Sweden.
Von Konow exhibited extensively, publicly and commercially both in Sweden and internationally. He showed with Atelier 17 throughout Europe and America and in 1958 he received international recognition with the award of one of the grand prizes at the Ljubljana Graphic Exhibition.
Examples of his work are held in the collections of the Swedish Museum of Modern Art, the Swedish National Museum and Waldemarsudde in Stockholm; Gothenburg and Norrköping Art Museums, Oslo National Gallery; KODE: Bergen Art Museum; Ateneumin, Helsinki; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the British Museum, London. Tragically he was killed in a car accident in Sweden in 1959 at only 44 years old.
