Roland Wakelin is considered one of the founders of Australian Modernism. He was — along with Roy de Maistre, Grace Cossington Smith, Kenneth Macqueen and Margaret Preston — a member of what later came to be called the Contemporary Group.

In the year Wakelin painted The bridge under construction, he published an article on Cezanne and modern painting. It was among the first attempts to explain Modernism to an Australian audience. He wrote that concentration on realistic representation resulted in a destruction of the 'rhythmic flow of line'. Wakelin and the younger painters of the 1920s considered paintings as 'objects' in themselves — flat surfaces on which colour, tone and line are manipulated, independent of reality. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was a popular subject for Sydney modernists because it symbolised everything that was progressive in Australia.

An anonymous art critic (possibly Basil Burdett) at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of Wakelin's 1928 exhibition:

. . . There is much more in these works than appears to a casual glance — especially in the glance of one accustomed to the highly finished technique of the realistic school. Mr Wakelin is a follower of Cezanne. He emulates the French painter, striving after mass and adopts the same methods as Cezanne to obtain these qualities. His work is stimulating and grows upon the spectator who approaches it in a sympathetic spirit.