A Satire of Institutional Boredom: Saul Steinberg’s Smithsonian Portfolio (1967)

“My best work springs out of boredom and trying to amuse myself”, confessed Saul Steinberg in 1956. Widely published in The New Yorker, as well as numerous other magazines and journals, he built his reputation as an artist working in a broad variety of media, from drawings, collages, and photomontages, to murals, fabric design, and stage sets. Known and remembered as a famous artist, Steinberg was, in fact, trained as an architect, a lesser-known detail that is fundamental to both his personal and his professional genealogy. Moreover, his approach to boredom as a catalyst of creative imagination is intriguing and thought-provoking. But what does it actually mean? This essay will examine Steinberg’s explorations of ennui through a collection of drawings made in Washington, D.C. on Smithsonian Institution stationery in 1967. From these drawings, a tension emerges between the institutional boredom inherent to the bureaucratic apparatus and the creative impetus that arises from the boredom of slow, repetitive acts. Architecture is both the vehicle and the subject of these explorations.