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The Amsterdam Museum Drops the Term ‘Golden Age,’ Arguing That It Whitewashes the Inequity of the Period

In the coming months, the museum will remove all appearances of the term in its galleries. It will also change the name of its permanent “Dutchmen of the Golden Age” exhibition at the Hermitage Museum—an Amsterdam-based branch of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia—to “Group Portraits From the 17th Century.”

The renaming effort is part of a larger campaign at the Amsterdam museum to become more inclusive. Later this month, the institution will host a symposium for museum professionals and community members about the way it represents the nation’s history in the 17th century. That same day, the museum will open a new photography exhibition positioned as a response to “Group Portraits From the 17th Century,” in which Dutch people of color are shown in historical settings. 

These moves are part of a wave of museums reconsidering the way they have presented their collections for decades. Last year, for example, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto renamed the Canadian artist Emily Carr’s 1929 painting Indian Church as Church at Yuquot Village to acknowledge the Indigenous community that lived where the church was located.

The Problem of ‘the Golden Age’
by Tom van der Molen (a curator at the Amsterdam Museum)

Dutch Golden Age, a period that witnessed the unprecedented, unique blossoming of power, wealth and cultural development in a small territory, was an important part of the way in which history was used to cement a sense of national identity. He therefore referred to it emphatically as ‘our Golden Age’ the heyday was our pride, our property, and part of the identify of every ‘cultivated Dutchman’. In other words, ‘Golden Age’ is a term devised to gold-plate Dutch national identity, to dress ‘cultivated Dutchness’ in a coat of excellence – indeed, superiority – with regard to all other nations. This means that ‘Golden Age’ is a term that automatically excludes certain people. If your ancestors did not share in the power and wealth of the seventeenth century, or were actually among the victims of the Dutch Republic’s efforts to increase its power and wealth, the term ‘Golden Age’ is at best irrelevant to you, and at worst a phrase that bristles with hostility.