Lars Vilks
Cartoonist whose depiction of the Prophet as a dog forced him to live under armed guard for 10 years
LARS VILKS, who has died aged 75, was a Swedish artist who attracted international notoriety with his drawings featuring the Prophet Muhammed. Spending his last 10 years under state protection after multiple assassination attempts, Vilks was killed in a traffic collision in south-west Sweden, alongside the two police bodyguards he was travelling with.
In June 2007 Vilks was invited to contribute to an exhibition titled Dogs in Art at a local gallery in the Swedish town of Tällerud. His drawings, which showed the head of the Prophet on the body of a robotic dog, were intended as a comment on political correctness and the limits of art.
“It was said that everything had been done, there are no borders [and] everything is possible in art. And I didn’t believe that at all. I knew, for example, that there was one example of a taboo you never touch, and that is to go into something concerning Islam,” Vilks explained at a free speech conference in 2010.
The gallery, however, got cold feet and the drawings were removed, resurfacing two months later to illustrate an article on censorship in Nerikes Allehanda, a Swedish local newspaper. After the story was picked up by the national broadsheet Jyllands-posten, protests from Islamic groups began.
“It started to spread, and more Muslims were suddenly insulted. There were demonstrations in Pakistan and Bangladesh.” he said. “The president of Iran at the time, Ahmadinejad, said the Jews were behind it. That’s how it turned south on me.”
The Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim countries, condemned the drawings and the Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was forced to hold a meeting with the ambassadors from 22 Muslim countries in an attempt to calm the situation. Swedish companies operating abroad, including Ericsson, Volvo and Ikea, were told to step up security.
In November a fatwa was issued in the name of Abu Omar al-baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, placing a £74,000 bounty on Vilk’s head and Säpo, the Swedish security service, started to provide the artist with round-the-clock protection. Vilk told reporters he had taken to sleeping with an axe next to the bed but noted wryly: “I suppose this makes my art project a bit more serious. It’s also good to know how much one is worth.”
The threat to his life was no joke, however. In 2009 three Americans and seven foreign nationals living in Ireland were arrested over a transatlantic plot to assassinate the artist. In 2010 Vilks appeared on an al-qaeda hit list alongside Flemming Rose, the then arts editor of Jyllandsposten, as well as Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hedbo who was killed in the attack on the magazine’s offices five years later. During a 2015 conference attended by Vilks entitled Art, Blasphemy and the Freedom of Expression at a Copenhagen café, a lone gunman stormed the building, killing one. A few weeks later the artist’s house was petrol-bombed. Two Swedish brothers of Kosovar descent were jailed for the attack.
Lars Endel Roger Vilks was born on 20 June 1946 in Helsingborg, Sweden, to Stina, a local woman who worked in a corset factory, and Eino, an Estonian mechanic who left the family a year after the boy’s birth. He attended school in Höganäs, but refused to be cowed by the more popular kids and was bullied as a consequence. Leaving at 16, he got a job at the local ceramics factory and became involved in Left-wing politics.
With no formal art training, in the 1970s Vilks started painting. He went on to study art history at Lund University in 1987 and taught at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts from 1988-93. From 1997-2003 he was a professor in art theory at Bergen National Academy of the Arts.
In 1980 Vilks embarked on a series of sculptures made from driftwood. Nimis, a work using 75 tonnes of scavenged material, was erected without permission in a remote location on the Kullaberg nature reserve in the south of Sweden. Though the towering sculpture became a popular tourist attraction, the authorities were not impressed and tried to have it removed.
Vilks thwarted their efforts through years of appeals and court appearances, eventually forcing the government to back down by selling Nimis to the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. On Beuys’s death in 1986, ownership passed to the public installation artist Christo.
Having added additional sculpture in the same site, again illegally, by 1996 Vilks had proclaimed the area to be Ladonia, an independent country. Currently there are 25,302 citizens of Ladonia from more than 50 countries. None reside on the nature reserve.
Lars Vilks, born June 10 1946, died October 3 2021