Opening of the Exhibition Egon Schiele. Oslo, Norway, 18 April 2007

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1 Opening of the Exhibition Egon Schiele Oslo, Norway, 18 April 2007 Your Majesties, City Commissioner, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen It is a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to address you in this Museum devoted to one of the greatest artists Norway has given to the world. I am particularly honoured by the presence of their Majesties the King and the Queen. Munch, to whose works this Museum has been dedicated, was the greatest Norwegian painter. My delegation and I are still under the overwhelming impression of the magnificent works displayed in the Munch-Hall in your National Gallery, which we had opportunity to visit this morning. On the other hand, the exhibition to be opened in the Munch Museum presents eminent works of one of our greatest Austrian painters, which

2 2 so far never have been shown in Norway before. This in itself is a major landmark in our bilateral cultural relations. That this event should take place during this State Visit constitutes a very fortunate coincidence: The past two days, besides encounters with the political leaders of this country, have given us opportunities to get acquainted with some of Norway s most significant achievements in the field of art. Hence I welcome this occasion to reciprocate to a certain extent the enriching experiences we received in the last days. This exhibition echoes the extraordinary show of paintings by Edward Munch with which the reopening of the Albertina in Vienna in 2003 was celebrated, and at which HM Queen Sonja gave us the honour of her presence. And this exhibition in turn forms the first step in a new cooperation-project that brings works from the Munch-Museum to museums in Vienna.

3 3 Munch and Schiele, contemporaries and leading figures in European art of their time, have, despite their otherwise different fate and life span, important features in common: - an innovative, highly personal and original formal language, and - thematically a self-reflexive research into the human condition of modern man, his exposure, his anxieties. This explains their continued and undiminished relevance to us. Munch is reported to have said that one of the most dangerous things an artist may encounter is praise. What he thereby seems to imply is that an artist has to go his own way regardless of what people think of his art. Schiele s difficult life, his struggle against the moral concepts of his time, looks like an illustration of this principle. When he died 1918 at the age of 28 of spanish influenza, he left an impressive opus that only gradually came to the present universal recognition.

4 4 The merit for this development is partly due to a visionary private collector, who has given evidence of a perfect eye by putting together the worldwide largest collection of Schieles, the core of the present Museum Leopold in Vienna. It is due to this collector s successful activity that an important part of the Austrian cultural heritage has remained in Vienna, substantially adding to the attraction of our capital for the cultural world. It is therefore with particular gratitude that I should like to greet Professor Rudolf and Dr. Elisabeth Leopold, who are present in this audience. Munch had a long and rich life and manifold contacts in the continental art world. We learn through this exhibition that he even exposed some of his works in Vienna. But already before that he was highly esteemed and exerted influence on other artists, which in Vienna can be traced in Schiele and other painters of his generation like Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka. The Munch Museum makes these thematic and formal parallels visible by accompanying this exhibition with a

5 5 presentation of some of Munch s relevant paintings in adjacent rooms. From now on for about two months you will have the possibility to see Schieles and Munchs side by side and experience two of the most important European painters and thereby a part of our common European heritage. It is fascinating to see the cross-fertilization which literature and art at the turn of the 19 th century underwent throughout Europe. Henrik Ibsen for example inspired his contemporaries with his early insights into the nature of psycho-analytics, which Arthur Schnitzler took further in both his theatrical and narrative works, parallel to the pioneering findings of Sigmund Freud whose 150 th birthday we celebrated last year. One of the questions of the ongoing debates in Europe is if there is such a thing as a common European identity. Taking into account the aforementioned examples, it should be evident to conclude that there is enough that we have in common to substantiate this concept. Going through this exhibition and

6 6 seeing the works of two painters from geographically very distant countries, you will recognize an artistic relationship, which is the clear exemplification of a strong common cultural context. Let me therefore thank the Munch Museum for hosting this exhibition, as well as the Leopold Museum, which has given the majority of the loans that compose it. My thanks go furthermore to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, and the Wien Museum for their loans, and to all those who by their efforts have contributed to this undertaking, to which I wish every success, as also to the future cooperation between Museums in Austria and Norway. Herewith I now declare the exhibition by works of Egon Schiele open.