Westmoreland exhibit explores artist’s talent in capturing Pittsburgh’s steel heyday

Artist Aaron Gorson came to Pittsburgh as a portrait painter in the early 20th century. But a trip to the city’s Bluff neighborhood changed all that.

“He looked up the Mon River and saw the spectacular show of the steel mills at night, with lights and flames flaring,” said Maxwell King, a former Heinz Endowments president. “Initially, he just started making paintings of the mills for himself. But one of them found its way to a relative of Andrew Carnegie, and suddenly the titans of industry began buying up his paintings.”

Gorson’s industrial artwork, paired with King’s words, is part of a new exhibit at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. King came to the museum initially to research Gorson for a biography he is working on. When museum staff asked about his research, they suggested curating a small gallery.

“In his time, he was the leading industrial artist in America, probably in the world,” King said. “When he was here, Pittsburgh was the center of the world for manufacturing and steel production. He saw the incredible spectacle of steelmaking and understood the beauty of it.”

The irony, King said, is that nearly every other painter in Southwestern Pennsylvania at the time was riding on trains to Westmoreland and Cambria counties for their inspiration.

“They were coming out here to paint all these bucolic scenes,” said King, 80, of Ligonier. “They thought industry was terrible, all this smoke and flames and dark skies. But Gorson talks about how
beautiful the steelmaking process is. He captured one of the most important things in the world, and his paintings of the mills at night are really lovely and impressionistic.”

The exhibit features works on loan from private collections, and the text is drawn from King’s research into Gorson’s life and career, which will be collected and expanded upon in his upcoming biography, “Fire in the Night Sky,” to be published in spring 2026.

King, a former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, has written biographies on Pittsburgh artist John Kane as well as Fred Rogers.

“Originally, I resisted looking into Gorson’s life, because I thought his life wasn’t all that interesting,” King said. “But my research proved otherwise.”

In fact, Gorson may have been too good at his industrial artwork, King said.

“After about 20 years, he felt he’d sort of painted himself into a corner,” King said. “He picked up and moved his family to New York City, lived in the Bronx and began doing paintings of Harlem, the Hudson River, ships on the waterfront — and nobody bought them.”

What had initially been a passion slowly became more of a workaday job in Gorson’s later career, as he moved back to Pittsburgh and returned to paintings centered around industry.

“He’d established this great reputation for it, and then he couldn’t escape it,” King said.