"[In the 1930s] the United States was suffering through the worst months of the Great Depression, but somewhat ironically, New York was enjoying a construction boom that would result in some of Manhattan's greatest landmarks, including...Rockefeller Center (1932-33). Rivera, ever fascinated by technology and labor, would have been drawn immediately to the excavation sites, especially...the twenty-two acres that had been demolished to make way for Rockefeller Center, the largest privately-funded building project in history and one of the few places in the city where one could observe so many workers actually at work... Images of workers among steel girders, covered in bright red primer, probably at Rockefeller Center... were all apparently taken from a small sketchbook; several other drawings from the same sketchbook are known... On most sheets, workers are observed from a distance (perhaps reflecting safety barriers), almost lost amid the girders, wood planks used for scaffolding, dark black beams not yet covered in primer, and the yellow supports of construction cranes. The faceless men wearing overalls and cloth caps generally work alone, painting girders, engaged in a foundry, or swinging sledgehammers... each of these drawings seem to be a meditation on line and structure, apparent in the rigorous formal qualities of each scene as well as in the subject himself...Rivera might not have known when or how he would use the drawings, but he was certainly fascinated by the girder as a metaphor of the modern age, and symbolic of social, economic, and political progress, especially in the Americas."

-James Oles, "Diego Rivera" in Exh. Cat., Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Intersecting Modernities: Latin American Art from the Brillembourg Capriles Collection, 2013, pp. 49-50