When the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg sent 60 paintings and other works from its collection "Born of Fire: The Valley of Work" to the Rhineland Industrial Museum in Germany, the hope was that the Germans would relate to the exhibition's steel mill theme.

They did -- so much so that it prompted one German official, head of his country's version of the Peace Corps, to make a visit to Pittsburgh and Greensburg.

The Westmoreland's show opened Feb. 4 in Oberhausen, a city in what was once Germany's industrial heartland. It was there that museum Director and Chief Executive Officer Judith Hansen O'Toole and curator Barbara L. Jones met Dr. Jurgen Wilhelm, director general of German Development Service, as well as a member of the Rhineland Regional Assembly governmental body.

"He was just really intrigued by [the exhibition]," Ms. O'Toole said.

So intrigued in fact he decided to change his upcoming travel plans to this country so that he could work in a visit to an area of Pennsylvania which seemed so similar to his own. He also planned to visit New York and Washington, D.C.

Last Thursday and Friday Dr. Wilhelm got his wish. He toured neighborhoods and institutions in Pittsburgh and Greensburg and seemed thrilled to be there, Ms. O'Toole said. In addition to the Westmoreland Museum, Dr. Wilhelm toured the Frick Art and Historical Center, the Sen. John Heinz Regional History Center and neighborhoods where the steel barons once lived.

His region and this one are very similar, she said.

"It was astonishing the similarities," Ms. O'Toole said of the areas, which were once thriving centers of industry and are now changed forever.

But thanks to the museum's traveling exhibit, the first for the Greensburg-based museum, the art also may be shown in industrial areas of Spain and England after its scheduled finish in Germany on May 1. The fact that 45 to 50 artists painted the mills, the neighborhoods surrounding them and the families affected by them was something new to the Europeans.

Some paintings show the mills at night with the bright fires providing brilliant contrasts. Others show houses in neighborhoods with the sun barely breaking through the smoke from those mills.

"They had never thought of telling the story through art," Ms. O'Toole said.

However, Ms. O'Toole was just as fascinated with the Germans' reuse of their old steel mills.

In one case, an old mill was turned into a symphony hall.

"You still have the sense of power [in the mill]," Ms. O'Toole said. Yet it's been turned into something completely different, she said.