Nor can the “X Portfolio” be received neutrally; its contents, too, for somewhat different reasons, are hot. They probably don’t shock as they may once have. Time has seen to that. The Getty posts cautionary signs near its display of “X Portfolio” prints, but there’s nothing depicted in them that can’t be easily found, accessible to all, on the Internet. Some of the potentially most offensive scenes turn up, uncensored, in the mild-mannered HBO film.

Yet there are still places — this newspaper is among them — where these pictures are still considered too transgressive for reproduction. Mapplethorpe is one of the most popular photographers of the second half of the 20th century. His stylistic influence is widespread, particularly on advertising, a field he returned to late in his career. He made news when a print of “Man in a Polyester Suit” sold for close to a half-million dollars at Sotheby’s last year. But in many outlets, reports of the sale were published without a photo.

This refusal to show his art — this exercise of discretion, let’s call it — points to the most interesting thing about it, and about him: It reasserts his status as a radical. This is a crucial status for a gay artist to maintain at a time when “gay” is being domesticated and normalized, its potential for political resistance smoothed away.

At one time, early on, in an entirely unsaintly way — “I’m not attempting to make a social statement,” he once said — he challenged the sexual mores of his time, and ideas of what art could and could not be. Much of his subsequent work will keep him popular: the flowers, the portraits, the beautiful bodies. But the pictures that kept him out of the Corcoran are the ones that will keep him in history.