After immigrating to America, Gaston Lachaise abandoned his European academic training and began his own artistic explorations, favoring celebrations of the human body. Commissioned as a tribute to labor, these sculptures depict the workers as muscular, heroic male figures, idealizing both manual labor and supreme physical beings. Their strong shapes and curvilinear forms reveal the artist’s knowledge of human anatomy and musculature. The same year they were installed, Lachaise was given a one-man show by the Museum of Modern Art.