The volume of his photographs that Robert Mapplethorpe published three years ago carried self-portraits on both front and back. There he was on one cover in a black leather jacket, sporting an updated biker haircut, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. It was the Mapplethorpe of whips and sexual appliances, the one who had careered into the art world in the late 1970s with images of homosexual sadomasochism. But on the back cover he offered a different version of himself, bare chested and slender, in pale makeup: the artist as breakable cherub, with a whiff of androgyny and maybe a...
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