Aaron Harry Gorson (1872-1933)
Monongahela Steel Mills and Barges, 1912
Aaron Harry Gorson was born June 2, 1872, in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. Kovno was a city with a thriving textile industry, and at age thirteen Gorson was apprenticed to a tailor. In 1888 he immigrated to the United States to join an older brother in Philadelphia. He soon found employment and worked as a machine operator in a clothing factory during the day, while at night he attended classes at the Spring Garden Institute to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.
He settled in Pittsburgh in 1903, and soon began to paint the city’s steel mills. Most he painted from the outside, though occasionally he made dramatic interior views. The industrial landscape remained his favorite theme until he moved to New York in 1921, and his night scenes of the Bessemer furnaces convey the dark beauty of his subjects, some of which he painted at dusk to emphasize a poetic mood. Like most of the artists who were inspired by industry before the Depression, he was little concerned with the labor conditions inside, and Monongahela Steel Mills and Barges (1912) is typical of his Pittsburgh work. Smoke, whether it came from smokestacks or trains, appealed to Gorson and was a strong formal element of his paintings of the rugged mills. But the smoke, soot, and fumes that were characteristic of the nation’s capitol of coal and steel may have been picturesque to the artists who painted it, but the air pollution created by these industries was a public health problem for those who lived nearby.
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