We've all been to the DMV

Lawrence Downes has a review of a painting by the late George Tooker in The New York Times:

Government Bureau (photo), a 1956 painting by George Tooker, was inspired by his maddening encounter with the New York City Building Department. Most people who waste hours in line just end up with sore feet and headaches. Mr. Tooker, who died on 27 March, emerged with one of the best-known depictions of modern alienation and despair.
The painting, in luminous egg tempera, shows people waiting in a vaulted office that seems to stretch to infinity. Clerks stare emptily through glass partitions. No one talks or moves. It’s a waiting room; everybody just waits.
Mr. Tooker, a New Yorker who settled in Vermont, did a lot with angst— his paintings of subways, waiting rooms, and office cubicles are similarly haunting— but he also made lovely images of rapture and compassion. He said in 2002 that his pictures had gotten happier as he got older.
I wonder what he thought of institutional limbo today. The government bureau is now in our heads. It’s the infinite space we inhabit when we languish on hold. The chill light is computer glow. Our isolation may be deeper now than anyone imagined in the Fifties.
My father, a New Yorker who left newspapering to work in a government bureau, had Government Bureau on his office wall. I saw it as a boy and was scarred. Those pale hands and slumped shoulders. The desolate eyes. The unnerving thought that this was my father’s idea of decorating. I learned later that his motivation was of the mordant-droll variety. He said the picture was there to remind him how not to do his job.