Escaping the Boston Heat: How the Dark Side of History Illuminated My Visit to the MFA

How do you stay cool in the city during a heatwave? Visit an art museum.

Escaping the summer heat led me straight to one of my favorite spaces at the Museum of Fine Arts: the Center for Netherlandish Art. I’ve long been drawn to the Golden Age of Dutch painting. I have always loved the still lifes overflowing with spices, exotic woods, silver, porcelain, fruits, and nuts alongside familiar herring and oysters. These genre paintings render elegant silks and Middle Eastern carpets with astonishing realism.

It is a world of marvels, but beauty is only half the story. This era was defined by unprecedented prosperity fueled by global trade, early corporations, and the birth of the stock market. A rising class of merchants sought art for their homes, prompting artists to specialize in daily scenes, vibrant landscapes, and seascapes.

Yet there is a dark side to this legacy. The exotic goods brought home by Dutch ships were rooted in slavery and colonial exploitation. The MFA now includes direct commentary and maps detailing this asymmetrical exchange. This is a level of historical transparency I had never seen so explicitly displayed in these galleries.

Moving forward two centuries, I entered a world of color and light: French Impressionism. Painting en plein air, the Impressionists broke with academic tradition, aided by modern chemistry that brought new pigments and portable paint tubes. Just as 17th-century Holland was shaped by global trade, 19th-century France was transformed by the Industrial Revolution.

The Impressionists embraced the modern world of train stations, dance halls, theaters, and boating parties as their subject. But they didn't idealize it. Monet’s London series captures the fog-choked Thames, where dense, heavy brushmarks carry the tangible weight of industrial soot. Similarly, Edgar Degas depicted women at work, the milliners, launderers, and dancers, with an unerring, unromanticized realism. These were the working-class women whose labor made upper-class life possible, painted in intense colors that further disrupted academic norms.

Pushing into the late 20th century and contemporary work, the exhibit Ebb and Flow centers on movement created without traditional representation. Here, color, brushwork, and material replace form.

El Anatsui’s wall sculpture, Black River, crafted from discarded bottle caps and foil labels, forms soft, cloud-like puffs that belie its metallic nature. Debris from a colonial past is transformed into an artwork that simultaneously critiques colonialism and celebrates native ingenuity.

Although not included in Ebb and Flow, in a nearby gallery, Steve Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block brings this thread front and center. His deceptively simple painting of colored squares recalls Josef Albers, but Locke intentionally links modern American wealth and modernist aesthetics directly to the legacy of chattel slavery:
​
"You don’t have the modernist development of culture without enslavement. And to try to pretend otherwise is kind of crazy." — Steve Locke

Globalism and colonization are not relic concepts; they dwell in our past and continuously evolve alongside technology.
​
 I do not usually leave an art museum carrying the heavy weight of European history, but art is elastic. It is always filtered through evolving personal experience. On any given day it is possible to discover a new way of looking. Acknowledging the ties between trade, labor, and art in the Dutch galleries colored my experience for the rest of the visit. It proved to be an excellent reminder that everything is connected. Art is not some pristine form of creativity untouched by the everyday world.

​