EXHIBIT HONOURING FIRST UN SECRETARY-GENERAL TRYGVE LIE OPENS AT HEADQUARTERS
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| Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York |
Note to Correspondents
EXHIBIT HONOURING FIRST UN SECRETARY-GENERAL TRYGVE LIE OPENS AT HEADQUARTERS
A photographic exhibition entitled “Trygve Lie: The First Secretary-General of the United Nations 1946-1953” will open with a reception in the North-east Gallery of the General Assembly Visitors’ Lobby on Thursday, 22 September 2005 at 6 p.m. This tribute to the life and work of Norway’s Trygve Lie will be officially opened by the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Jan Petersen, and will remain on view until United Nations Day, 24 October.
“I had been nothing less than catapulted into the Secretary-Generalship of this new international organization, to preserve peace and promote progress in a world beset by unrest, poverty, and great-power rivalry”, Trygve Lie wrote in his memoirs. “I asked myself again and again: why had this awesome task fallen to a labour lawyer from Norway? It was from the hopes and faith of the people in all countries, I decided, that I might be able to draw the strength for the ordeal and the challenge that lay ahead.”
The challenges were many and the exhibition focuses on some of them, showing Secretary-General Lie in photographs depicting major events in the United Nations’ early years.
The photographs in this exhibit, taken from the photo archives of the Library of the University of Oslo, the United Nations photo archives and various news agencies, were assembled by Norwegian photographer Øystein Thorvaldsen. Also included in this exhibit are documents and artefacts from the private collection of the Lie family.
This exhibition is presented by the Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations and the Department of Public Information in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations.
For more information on United Nations exhibitions, call Jan Arnesen, tel.: (212) 963-8531; or Liza Wichmann, tel.: (212) 963-0089, or visit the website at www.un.org/events/UNART.
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For information media • not an official record