Fire in the Night Sky: The Steel Mill Paintings of Aaron Gorson

Fire in the Night Sky celebrates pioneer industrial landscapist Aaron Gorson’s paintings of the Pittsburgh steel mills, focusing on the powerful and dramatic night scenes for which he is best known. Gorson (1872-1933) came to the United States from Lithuania in 1890 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and then in Paris. After Paris, Gorson returned to Pittsburgh, where he lived and painted until the early 1920s. Gorson was a true urban poet of the paintbrush, partial to the nighttime beauty of industrial Pittsburgh and the magic of the glowing lights from the smelting mills and their effects on river waters. King sets the mill paintings within the epic story of the place and the times: the development of the Pittsburgh steel industry and how the industrial and technological achievements of that era changed Pittsburgh and the world.

Maxwell King is former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, former head of the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh, and former head of the Fred Rogers Institute of St. Vincent College. He is the author of two other books, biographies of Fred Rogers and Pittsburgh painter John Kane. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.