Lars Vilks, Swedish artist, 1946-2021

Until his early sixties Lars Vilks lived in professional semi-obscurity, a condition only partly relieved by occasional legal and artistic disputes over two sprawling structures of driftwood, nails and rock that he had built without permission in a Swedish nature reserve. Then he published a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed’s head on a dog’s body, and achieved an international notoriety that by his own account he neither relished nor had fully anticipated.

Vilks was placed under police protection because of multiple threats to his life arising from the cartoon. He died at the age of 75 on October 3 in a car crash near Markaryd, a settlement in southern Sweden. Two policemen travelling with him were also killed in what the local authorities said was an accident.

It was an abrupt end to the life of a man who portrayed himself as a defender of artistic and political freedom of expression, a nonconformist who, in his own eyes, challenged the taboos of Islam and the groupthink of modern Swedish society when others kept silent. Admirers of Vilks recognised that he combined a rebellious streak with a nose for publicity. “At an early stage, Lars Vilks realised the impact of the media in generating meaning, and saw that art that did not get media coverage had a hard time surviving,” the Moderna Museet, a Swedish museum of modern art, wrote in 2004 in an introduction to his work.

The cartoon controversy erupted in 2007 when several Swedish newspapers, including the national daily Dagens Nyheter, published his derogatory image of Mohammed in a professed blow against censorship. Muslim believers generally consider any depiction of the Prophet to be offensive. Vilks had drawn several such cartoons for exhibition in Sweden, but the galleries he approached rejected them on security grounds. They had in mind the riots that broke out across the Islamic world in 2006 after Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, printed caricatures of the Prophet.

Upon his cartoon’s appearance, Vilks found himself at the centre of a storm of anger and indignation concentrated among the Muslim communities that had grown rapidly in Swedish cities and towns since the 1990s. He acknowledged that he had been wrong to think that the Danish troubles of 2006 were already water under the bridge. “What I expected was that my contribution would be a local event,” he wrote. “But I was naive about this.”

For Vilks, however, to be provocative was part of his artistic purpose. “We must be free to criticise religions. Why should Islam be exempted from the sort of criticism that is commonplace for Judaism and Christianity?” he asked in one interview. It was for this reason, he argued, that despite being no anti-Semite he had published a picture on his website under the title “modern Jewish sow, swollen by capitalism”.

In public statements he took aim at Islam more often than at other religions. He wrote on his blog that Islam “needs to be modernised”, and he questioned whether Swedish Muslims embraced free speech and other democratic values.

The death threats began when a group linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq put a $100,000 bounty on his head. Vilks said he had received a phone call warning that the group had offered an extra $50,000 to would-be killers “if they butcher you like a lamb”. Two Swedes of Kosovar descent were jailed in 2010 for throwing a petrol bomb at his home. Soon after the 2015 attacks in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a gunman opened fire at a Copenhagen café where Vilks was speaking. The artist escaped injury, but Finn Norgaard, a Danish film-maker, was killed.

Born in 1946 in the southern Swedish city of Helsingborg, Vilks was largely self-taught as an artist. Until the cartoon furore, the works for which he was best known were “Nimis” and “Arx” (Latin for “too much” and “citadel”), the bulky wooden structures he put up in the Kullaberg Nature Reserve in Skane county. “Nimis” is still there, a minor tourist attraction.

Vilks shared his life with a partner he met in 1989, but whose identity has been kept under wraps because of the security risks that surrounded the artist. Vilks never had any doubt that his cartoons of Mohammed served a useful cause. “In art it is said there are no longer any boundaries to cross. The little drawings made it possible to show that boundaries undoubtedly exist,” he said.

tony.barber@ft.com