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About the Collection
The Westmoreland Museum of American Art's extensive collection of paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs of the Big Steel Era in Pittsburgh are images that 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. This was 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 such as Joseph Pennell, Aaron Harry Gorson, Ernest Lawson, Elizabeth Olds, Otto Kuhler, and Colin Campbell Cooper, among others, offer their unique interpretation of the gritty, smoke-filled industrial environment they encountered in Pittsburgh. Each of these artists chose his/her subject with a unique eye to the components of industry that inspired them--blast furnaces, trains, the gigantic mills, the rivers, the bridges, the city, or the worker. They approached these subjects in their own individual styles; thereby creating a collection of work that crosses the stylistic boundaries of impressionism, ash can school realism, modernism, and American Scene regionalism.
Born of Fire is the story of a shared past and future forged from steel, seen through the eyes of great American artists.
You may browse the gallery or you can select a painting by name and artist.
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