This weekend I finally got a chance to look around the "Man at Work" collection at MSOE's new Grohmann Museum, 1000 N. Broadway. I'd heard a lot about the museum while it was in the works and watched -- from outside -- the transformation of a fortress-like building into one with a bright, open atrium. But my first visit was still a pleasant surprise.

Although I don't love the looming statuary atop the building, the rooftop scupture "garden" looks like it will be great when it's not covered in ice and snow. Nice, too, is the spiral staircase that affords views of Downtown as well as down to the lovely mosaic on the floor and up to Hans Dieter Tylle's mural on the dome and stained glass windows that adorn what will be Eckhart Grohmann's office when it's completed.

Despite having already seen parts of Grohmann's collection of paintings and sculptures that catalog the many ways humans have put themselves -- and each other -- to work, I was still surprised that three floors had to be crammed in pretty tight to show all the works. (Who knows, maybe more are in storage or on display elsewhere, too!)

Most of the artists are German, but certainly not all, and most of the scenes are industrial, but, again, not all. There are paintings of agricultural harvests and frightening early medical scenes, too, for example.

While to the untrained eye a lot of the industrial arts looks a bit samey, there are some great works. Some, like a Tylle painting of a ship under construction, are amazing in their detail. Many are explosions of color, especially the paintings of foundries and furnaces that are awash in the orange-yellow light of fire.

I especially enjoyed the Futurist color use in Getty Bisagni's "Misfortune at the Mine," and the impressionistic earth tones of Estonian painter Eugene Ducker's "Amber Gatherers on the Beach," both on the first floor.

On the top floor, way in the back corner is a study by Max Liebermann for his "Flax Barn" in 1886. This is an early version of a later painting -- now in Berlin's National Gallery -- that is considered among the artist's best works.

The $5 admission is a small price to pay to see an expansive collection of art that reflects one man's passion but at the same time all of our laboring history.