Greifswald professors' gallery

Copy of the Rubenow plaque from the 18th century in the auditorium of the University of Greifswald

The Greifswald Professorengalerie is a collection of paintings from the University of Greifswald . It contains commissioned portraits of over 200 former professors, deans and rectors from the 16th to 20th centuries.

history

The professors' gallery was brought into being by a council resolution from 1691. The holdings of the University of Greifswald include 79 oil portraits from the 16th to 18th centuries as well as the complete commissioned work of 32 portraits from the late Romantic period. One of the most valuable works is a copy of the earliest picture by a scholar in Greifswald from the 18th century: the so-called Rubenow tablet , the original of which was unveiled in St. Nikolai Greifswald around 1460 . The painting exhibited in the baroque auditorium portrays the first rector of the University of Greifswald Heinrich Rubenow (1400–1462) together with six professors from Rostock.

32 oil paintings by the Pomeranian painter and academic drawing master Wilhelm Titel (1784–1862) from 1831 to 1850 for the rectors and deans in office at the time are now hanging as a closed unit at the original location in the council hall of the main university building .

On the night of April 10-11, 1991, 45 of the paintings were stolen from the council hall. The perpetrators came utilizes the fact that the control unit of the alarm system , a proprietary development of the Department of Scientific and Technical Instrument University, mistaking it for a monitoring system of the State Security had been held on and off. There was also scaffolding on the building. The pictures were stolen along with the frame. Some of the pictures from the council hall, some of which were more valuable and which did not fit through windows or doors due to the size of the frames, were left behind by the perpetrators. In May of the same year, the W50 truck used to transport the stolen goods was found in Berlin . The thieves initially failed to find suitable buyers for the portrait collection. Finally they sold the pictures to two West Berlin entrepreneurs for 6,000 DM . At the beginning of September, the police were able to secure the pictures in one of the two business partners' homes. The three thieves were sentenced to several years in prison. The buyers escaped jail time. In court they testified that they had been offered the pictures as originally intended for sale by the foreign exchange procurement department under Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski in the West. They also intended to have the paintings restored and returned to the university. In December 1991 they donated DM 75,000 for the restoration. The paintings, some of which were badly damaged, were returned to the University of Greifswald. The cost of the restoration has so far been more than 100,000 euros. 13 pictures are still pending restoration (as of June 2016).

The professors' gallery is still being expanded today: Claudia Hauptmann has been creating portraits of the former rectors Hans-Jürgen Zobel (1928 - 2000), Martin Franz and Jürgen Kohler (* 1953) after their term of office has expired since 1989 . In 2014, Johannes Grützke (* 1937) portrayed the 350th Rector of the university, Hans-Robert Metelmann , who held the post of Rector from 2000 to 2002.