The power and the glory that was Pittsburgh is gone. What remains is a large and evocative body of work documenting "The Valley of Work," and grateful we are to have it.

	St. Michael's Church, South Side, figures prominently in Annie Campbell's circa 1915 pastel, "Pittsburgh Aglow." Click photo for larger image. 'Born of Fire' Where: Westmoreland Museum of American Art, North Main Street, Greensburg. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays (Thursdays until 9 p.m.). Information: Admission is $3; 724-837-1500 or www.wmuseumaa.org; www.bornoffire.org.

Like tiny tintypes carrying the faces of the long dead, the images remain after the life-force has departed. We marvel that something once so strong and dynamic could so quickly and utterly vanish, survived by something that, in comparison, seems so small and static and insignificant. Who would have thought the mills would die and the art endure?

But the works now on the walls of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg have their own power, the power to conjure up the region in its industrial heyday, in all its fire-breathing, smoke-spewing, air-fouling, water-polluting, job-giving glory.

Here is a mill at night, silhouetted against the white light of the blast furnace, thick with impasto where Aaron Gorson has piled on the ivory paint. Over there is Annie Cambell's twilight view of the South Side Slopes, twinkling with the warm yellow lights of the houses and factories surrounding St. Michael's, and the J&L stacks stalwart in the background. And here is Everett Warner on a crisp, clear day in Oakland, showing us how two steam engines snaked a train through the snow-covered valley of Panther Hollow.

If you've ever doubted there is -- or was -- a Pittsburgh palette, stand back and survey the gallery's blacks, blues, grays, mauves, browns, fiery oranges and smoky whites. Back in the day, few cities had such a strong sense of place, and there was no place in America like Pittsburgh, where dark mill sheds and soaring stacks formed the bold backdrop of an ever-shifting scene, where muddy rivers could turn into golden highways at sunset.

"The Valley of Work" exhibit, featuring 142 paintings, prints and photographs by 68 artists and photographers, is one component of the museum's ambitious "Born of Fire" initiative, which also includes the exhibit catalog, a CD by the Pittsburgh folk group The NewLanders and a 60-minute documentary film by Bill Mosher.

St. Paul Cathedral dominates Everett Longley Warner's circa 1930, oil-on-canvas view of Panther Hollow, above. Unlike most Pittsburgh painters, Warner, an Iowa native, favored brilliant color and bright light. Click photo for larger image.

The 142 works compose the museum's entire "Scenes of Industry" collection (save one; there are now 143), begun by the Westmoreland's founding director, Paul Chew, as part of a broader mission to collect Western Pennsylvania art. When Judith O'Toole became director in 1993, she was so taken with the industrial scenes, many of them in storage, that she created a special gallery for them.

With the "Born of Fire" project, designed to showcase and market the collection, came the opportunity to exhibit, for the first time, everything the museum had.

"The goal was to really try to tell the story of it through the artists' eyes and voices, to get to their point of view," said Westmoreland curator Barbara L. Jones, who organized the exhibit and researched and wrote the catalog essay, drawing heavily on artists' interviews with Pittsburgh newspaper critics and reporters from as early as 1908.

As laborers, skilled and unskilled, were drawn to the work of the mills, painters clearly were drawn to the romance.

"What interested me was the way the mills lie under the hills on the curving river, the way [the river] winds up to them, the way the graceful iron bridges span it, and the deep-sighing steamboats push the barges up and down; the way the clouds mingle with the smoke," Joseph Pennell wrote about his 1908 etching of the Homestead works.

"I laugh when I hear people railing at Pittsburg[h]'s smoky atmosphere," said Gorson, a Lithuanian immigrant, to Charles Gillespie of The Pittsburgh Press in 1908. "All painters surely must bear me out when I say the smoke-filled foggy air adds wonderfully to the artistic effectiveness of the view."

The Gorson paintings -- there are six in the exhibit -- are part of what Jones calls the "drama and spectacle" part of the show, which also includes smaller sections on the human condition and the decline of the steel industry. Although Martin Leisser was on the scene earlier, it was Gorson's aesthetic and financial success that finally persuaded Pittsburgh artists to embrace what was around them. Only one other painter -- another immigrant, Otto Kuhler, with 21 paintings and prints -- is better represented than Gorson, who worked here from 1903-21.

Kuhler, who grew up in a mill-owning family, arrived from his native Germany in 1923, drawn to what he regarded as "the most picturesque place in the world." He spent five years here, often working from his portable etching studio -- his automobile, where he would sit on the running board and draw on the waxed plates.

"The Valley of Work" exhibit title comes from the name Kuhler gave his 1925 etching of Homestead. His 14 etchings in the exhibit are accompanied by seven paintings, which Jones interprets as blending elements of realism, abstraction and the Ashcan school.

Jones had to reach beyond Western Pennsylvania for images relating to the jobs and living conditions of the men who produced the seducing theater of the mill, partly, it would seem, because the Westmoreland lacks drawings and prints by the two artists who made the Pittsburgh mill worker their subject, Joseph Stella and Jean-Emile Laboureur, both of whom Rina Youngner explores in her "Industry in Art" book published earlier this year. Picking up the slack, in part, are the 1930s prints of Scranton-based Michael Gallagher, who depicts the physical and emotional tolls taken on coal miners and their wives.

As a coda to the bulk of the exhibit, a smaller gallery holds the "Remnants of a Steel City," primarily the photographs of Aaronel deRoy Gruber, Mark Perrott and Pam Bryan of the mills as dying artifacts.

The hard-bound catalog -- "Born of Fire: "The Valley of Work" (Westmoreland Museum, $37.50) -- begins with an essay by the University of Pittsburgh's Edward Muller and Carnegie Mellon's Joel Tarr; the two historians provide a framework for the exhibit with a concise, detailed overview of the steelmaking process and how, why and when the industry came to Pittsburgh.

On the first page of her essay, Jones gets the foreground river right in Emil Bott's 1851 Pittsburgh panorama -- it's the Mon -- but misidentifies the vantage point as the North Side, giving the reader pause as to what lies ahead. The rest of the essay seems sure-footed in its facts and sensible in its interpretation. By taking the story to the present day, Jones' essay -- and the exhibit itself -- is a welcome extension of Youngner's book, which covers the years 1812 to 1920.

Jones joins Youngner, Muller, Tarr, O'Toole and others on Mosher's DVD documentary ("Born of Fire: How Pittsburgh Built a Nation"), which weaves together interviews, images from the exhibit and songs from The NewLanders' CD ("Born of Fire: Songs of Steel and Industry") in telling the story of the city's industrial evolution.

A portion of "Born of Fire" -- 60 works -- will open at the Rhineland Industrial Museum in Oberhausen, Germany, in February; Jones is looking for two other European venues as well as American ones. This historic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibit ends here Sept. 3.