
There are no hardhats, no steel-toed boots. Oscar Bach wasn’t after a realistic portrayal of work in the 1930s, but a heroic tribute to the many forms of manual labor. The muscled men, in the angular Art Deco style, are engaged in metalworking, forging, plowing, and grinding. The scenes, or roundels, are cast in bronze, and set in doors of steel, itself a symbol of the industrial age. The doors are also decorated with human and animal masks.