Serving Up the Smithsonian à la Steinberg

What was he thinking? The Smithsonian as a "tempest in a teapot?" A feast for the nation?

In 1967, Saul Steinberg (1914–99) was an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institution, where he completed these drawings. With satirical wit, he reminds us of the power of the pen.

During his three months in Washington, Steinberg used the official writing paper as his drawing pad to introduce a large group of pictures all containing, adapting, re-reading and reworking the roughly oval patch of architectural view. They represent one of the artist's most characteristic pictorial genres, the metamorphoses of a given image—whether a drawn line or a spread of official graphic rhetoric like a postage-stamp or banknote—by the magic of pen, pencil, crayon and brush.

Today marks James Smithson's death in 1829 in Genoa, Italy, an event that ultimately led to the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. To learn more, visit From Smithson to Smithsonian: The Birth of an Institution.

Source: Steinberg at the Smithsonian: The Metamorphoses of an Emblem (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1973).

Pictured top: Saul Steinberg, 1914 Romania–1999 USA, (Untitled), 1967, brush and ink, 10 9/16 x 8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist.

Pictured bottom: Saul Steinberg, 1914 Romania–1999 USA, (Untitled), 1967, pen and ink, 10 1/2 x 8 in., Gift of the artist.