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About the Book
Southwestern Pennsylvania: The steel making capital of the world for more than 100 years. A region built from pig iron and slag, teeming with blast furnaces, pump houses and rolling mills. This is a region that was shaped by more than just the strength of steel. Its history also documents the fragile human fabric that gave it life. The people who lived here raised entire communities in the steep hills that peered down into the mills, and were comprised of entire generations of men and women whose tireless efforts literally built the nation and the world.
This is the first book on the Westmoreland Museum of American Art's extensive collection of paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs of the Big Steel Era in Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania. These images express the immense energy, power, wonder and force of the vast industrial complex that took shape in the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth-century, a time when Pittsburgh became the nation's foremost center of iron making and mass produced steel.
Regional and national artists, some simply visiting the city, were struck by the sight of "pillars of smoke" by day and "pillars of fire" at night. Working in diverse styles, they painted what they saw: huge iron and steel mills lining the banks of Pittsburgh's three rivers; railroad tracks and yards; coke works and other industrial facilities; bridges and barges; giant moving cranes like things of life bearing kettles of molten steel. It is little wonder that these dramatic industrial landscapes inspired so many artists.
Artists also unwittingly recorded the devastating toll on the region's environment-its air, water, and land-and the difficult living conditions of the European immigrant workers and their families.
Barbara L. Jones, curator, describes with great knowledge and keen perception the complete Westmoreland collection, the individual works, and the artists who created them.
Professors Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr give an insightful history of the coal and steel industry in and around Pittsburgh from its early beginnings to the height of its power to its disappearance from the landscape.
Born of Fire is the story of a shared past and future forged from steel, seen through the eyes of artists, and represented here in 141 works of art, 51 of them illustrated in color and 141 in black white reproductions - the entire collection, as of this publication, although it will most certainly continue to grow.
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