In what ways does Hugo Gellert's 1932 mural for the Rockefeller Center in 1932 reflect the growth of public discontentment that had arisen from the aftermath of the Great Depression?

Many of Gellert’s works exemplify this growing public discontentment, most rhetorically in his untitled mural that was commissioned for the Rockefeller Center in 1932, where Gellert’s recurring representational motif of the ‘ideal’ worker is thus a major compositional necessity for the mural, with two adjacent walls symbolising the ‘struggle’ for the ‘worker’ through the allegorical placement of two enlarged building tools. As Gellert recalls, ‘there was a moon, which looked like a silver dollar. To the moon was tied a man, his hands tied behind him with ticker tape.’ Through this subversion of capitalism, Gellert is personifying the American Elite’s capitalistic desires as a metaphysical wealth-driven form of slavery. Marxist art historian Carol Duncan’s belief that artists at the turn of the century incorporated such ‘outrageous, vulgar, or ‘low’ art subjects’ to intentionally ‘repel high-art audiences’, distinctly touches upon Gellert’s driving aims for this particular mural. Gellert’s prior indictment he placed upon Diego Riviera for willingly working for capitalist patrons is construed in contradictions, as Gellert himself was commissioned to produce a mural on private property; the interior of the Center Theatre, one of the largest and most desirable theatres within New York in 1932, but was also owned by the Rockefellers, one of the richest families in the United States. However, by parodying the capital power of the Rockefellers and other members of the Elite, Gellert is consequently promoting the class-conscious proletarian paradigm as a means of invoking the debilitated labourer away from any superficially bourgeois or ‘high art’ representations of society.