The Swedish artist Lars Vilks had often joked that bodyguards would probably hold his hand on his deathbed. On Sunday at 3:25 p.m., the 75-year-old died on the way home in a police car, and two bodyguards posted for him died with him. A simple traffic accident, the police said on Monday, there was no evidence of external influences. The news spread around the world: The man who drew the prophet Mohammed as a dog is dead.
One can assume that Lars Vilks did not want to be remembered as a Mohammed caricaturist for three quickly thrown drawings from 2007. The real life’s work of the self-taught man, started in 1980, were two monumental sculptures on a beach in the Kullaberg nature reserve southern Swedish home Skåne. Nimis (Latin for: “too much”) he baptized one, wildly carved up from driftwood, Arx the other, piled up from rock – both stand on a rather inaccessible part of the coast. When the authorities got wind of the “illegal buildings”, a decade-long legal battle began, which took the strangest turns: In order to save his Nimis tower, Vilks once sold it to Joseph Beuys. And in 1996 Lars Vilks proclaimed the independent state of Ladonia around Nimis, had a queen elected and appointed himself State Secretary, as which he then set out to recruit more than 20,000 citizens from all over the world.
The terrorist group al-Qaeda put a price on his head: $ 100,000
Friends and acquaintances remembered in the Swedish media on Monday a warm-hearted, humorous man, someone who liked to provoke for his life and who ended up being “imprisoned in his own country” (according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter DN). In the last few years of his life he had to move house again and again, and since 2010 he has received police protection around the clock. It was only three years ago that the terrorist group al-Qaeda put a price on his head: $ 100,000 for whoever killed Lars Vilks, and a $ 50,000 bonus if Vilks were “slaughtered like a lamb” in the process . In Gothenburg the police arrested a murder squad scheduled for Vilks, and in Stockholm in 2010 a suicide bomber who referred to the “pig Vilks” for his crime blew himself up.
And all because in 2007 Lars Vilks decided to draw the prophet Mohammed with a dog’s body for a local exhibition about the “dog in art”. For many Muslims, this was double blasphemy: depictions of the prophet were taboo to them anyway and the dog is considered an unclean animal in Islam. For Vilks it was not just a gesture of provocation, but even more a gesture of solidarity with the Danish colleagues that appeared in the newspaper at the end of 2005 Jyllands-Posten had published their Mohammed cartoons and were threatened with death as a result. Now it was his turn.
In an obituary, his biographer accuses the Swedish compatriots of having disagreed with Vilks
In February 2015, Lars Vilks organized an event on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” in a café in Copenhagen. An Islamist assassin opened fire in the cafe and killed the filmmaker present, Finn Nørgaard, before rushing to the synagogue and killing another person. His bodyguards had brought Lars Vilks to safety. After that, writes his biographer Niklas Orrenius, Vilks was rarely in the mood for jokes. “When people die,” he quotes him, “then things get serious.” Orrenius throws in in an obituary DN his Swedish compatriots lacked solidarity with Lars Vilks. Vilks had to keep hearing that the caricatures were “unnecessary”: exhibitions and panel discussions were often canceled. “Vilks became radioactive among the Swedish public,” Orrenius writes.
After the news of death, there was great horror. The Prime Minister and the leaders of the major political parties expressed their condolences on Monday. The conservative one Svenska Dagbladet called him “the most headstrong artist of our time”. The liberal Dagens Nyheter praised him as a fighter for freedom of expression and saw in him the “most important Swedish artist of the 21st century”.
Incidentally, the authorities never succeeded in demolishing Vilk’s driftwood tower Nimis. Today thousands of tourists make pilgrimages to the place. And right up to the end his bodyguards had accompanied him to the stony beach every now and then, where Lars Vilks then collected faded wood and nailed it to the tower, which never wanted to be finished.