With Burns Night – the annual celebration of the life of Robert Burns – approaching this Thursday, we’re looking back to artist Douglas Gordon’s more nuanced homage to the giant of Scottish literature: Black Burns, shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2017. Gordon made a shattered counterpoint to the white marble statue of the poet by John Flaxman that stands proud in the Great Hall. Carved out of black marble from the same quarry, this broken double lay in ruins on the gallery floor.

The Glasgow-born artist often makes artworks by a process of destruction and is as unafraid to break down his idols as he is to laud them. Black Burns is an anti-monument that finds poignancy in the aspects of the poet’s life that Flaxman’s statue ignores – the poet’s womanising, drinking and the fact he was once so desperate for money that he booked passage to Jamaica with the goal of becoming a bookkeeper on a slave plantation (though the sudden success of his poetry meant the trip never happened). But Gordon was quick to point out at the time that he wasn’t seeking to disrespect the man who later wrote abolitionist poem The Slave’s Lament or to destroy his image, rather to open him up – to humanise a figure who has been cast in stone and placed out of reach.

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