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On Friday, October 5, half an hour before the museum's closing time, four figures wearing ski masks entered a gallery at Kulturen, the Museum of Cultural History, in Lund, Sweden, and cried, in Swedish, "We don't support this shit!" The lone female employee watching the space attempted to stop them, then took note of their axes and crowbars.

An accomplice videotaped the vandals as they smashed frames and defaced images. By the time they left, they had done $200,000 worth of damage, mutilating seven of the 14 photographs in Andres Serrano's The History of Sex. In their wake they left leaflets execrating decadent art. Footage of the attack -- edited, set to white-power heavy metal music, and entitled "Action against degenerate art in Lund, Sweden, 2007-10-05" -- appeared briefly on YouTube before it was removed for violating the website's terms of service.

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he vandals have not been caught; no group has claimed responsibility for the action. The perpetrators are believed to have been neo-Nazis, perhaps members of the Swedish Resistance Movement, whose exploits include an assault on the Stockholm Pride parade in 1999. When a similar attack was launched against photos by Dutch-American photographer Donald Mader in 1998, the Swedish National Socialist Youth Bund (now officially disbanded) eagerly took credit.

"It would sound like the same lot," says Mader, "and certainly the same modus operandi -- men in balaclavas raiding a museum and destroying a part of a show. The only difference seems to be that they did not hold a press conference afterwards, as they did after the destruction of my work."

Mader's non-pornographic depictions of naked boys, exhibited under the impeccably respectable aegis of Stockholm's Historical Museum, drew complaints from such organizations as Save the Children. When police said the photos were not child pornography and could remain on view, vigilantes intervened.

Serrano's History of Sex does not depict children, but its representations of homosexuality and interracial sex, its dissonant view of gender, and its subversive take on traditional body image are magnets for extremist vilification. Models include straight couples, gay couples, intergenerational couples, sexually ambiguous couples, a transsexual, a dwarf, and an amputee. The emphasis is on individuals' sexual fantasies. The focus is on models' faces.

The many species of sex

The Cibachrome photographs, shot in Amsterdam by the Cuban-American artist in 1995-'96, are formatted in bright, high-contrast four-by-five-foot prints. The work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Paris, Rome, and Thessaloniki without incident. When The History of Sex was installed at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, religious activists hurled paint bombs at the building, but when the series was first exhibited in Sweden -- at Stockholm's Galleri Charlotte Lund in 1997 -- no protests occurred.

Serrano is best known for "Piss Christ," one of a series of photographs juxtaposing iconic imagery with human body fluids. That single photo, taken out of context, was a flashpoint in the U.S. culture wars of the early '90s.

In Lund, the photos targeted for destruction depicted a white man fellating a black man; a fully-clothed woman fisting a naked man; a woman urinating in a man's mouth; a man performing auto-fellatio; a man whose pierced, stretched penis is attached to his nipples by a cord; a nude contortionist; and a naked woman stroking the penis of a horse.

The photo used to publicize the Kulturen exhibit, showing a male couple in an embrace, was guaranteed to attract the attention of right-wing homophobes. The Serrano show was scheduled in the context of socially and sexually-themed exhibits running at Kulturen throughout 2007 to honor the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus, during the tricentenary of his birth. Other exhibits on the program have included the Mr. Fransson Shovels Snow: Sweden and Nazism, and In Hate We Trust, a series of photos on gay-bashing by Swedish lesbian artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin. The October 5 raid may have been above all an attack on Kulturen's exhibition policies.

Kulturen is the largest museum in the southern Swedish province of Skåne. Lund itself, the home town of actor Max von Sydow, is a carefully preserved medieval university town of 76,000. Its inhabitants have a durable reputation for tolerance and informality.

"I never expected something like this," Serrano told the New York Times, "especially in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like something out of Harry Potter."

Since the '90s, however, the darker side of this Scandinavian Hogwarts has emerged as Neo-Nazism has made small but nimble inroads among Lund's 41,000 full and part-time students, some of whom actually live in Malmö, 17 kilometers away. Malmö is, with Stockholm and Gothenburg, one of Sweden's principal urban centers of extreme-right activity.

Paula Cooper Galleries, Serrano's home base in New York, was able to replace the seven damaged photos, which had initially been printed in triplicate. The exhibit is still open to the public, and will remain at Kulturen under heightened security until its scheduled closing on December 31.