ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE <i> by Richard Marshall with essays by Richard Howard, Ingrid Sischy (Little, Brown: $29.95) </i>

Even a superficial glance at this sampling of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work makes it clear that the tempest has outgrown its teapot. Had Sen. Jesse Helms and his ilk not turned these photographs into a cause ceelebre, few people would have paid any attention to them.

Mapplethorpe was a successful commercial photographer, and his pictures rarely transcend a fashion-magazine sensibility, despite references to Edward Weston, George Platt Lynes et al. The background in a portrait of a gay S-M couple is so cluttered with bric-a-brac, the result looks like a glossy magazine ad for a ritzy interior designer. The most disturbing element of his infamous “erotic” works is not their sexual content but their coldness. His nude studies of muscular black men look so remote and objectified, they suggest Pygmalion asking Venus to turn Galatea back into a statue. An offbeat coffeetable book for people who want to find out what the brouhaha in Cincinnati is about without bothering to fly to Ohio.