Robert Mapplethorpe's Sensual Flowers

As both the unlikely darling of New York’s avant-garde art galleries and a pivotal figure in the city’s burgeoning gay scene, artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s career was nothing if not duplicitous. On the one hand, he was heavily preoccupied with classicism: his rippling, muscular, anatomical nude studies recall Michelangelo’s David, while his sculptural images of hands have often been juxtaposed with casts made by French sculptor Rodin no less than a…