Andy Warhol at Tate Modern

There’s next to nothing we don’t know about Andy Warhol. This major retrospective is the first Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern for almost 20 years. Expect Marilyn Monroe, Coca-Cola and Campbell’s soup cans, also works never seen before in the UK. Twenty-five works from his Ladies and Gentlemen series – portraits of black and Latinx drag queens and trans women – are shown for the first time in 30 years. Popularly radical and radically popular, Warhol was an artist who reimagined what art could be in an age of immense social, political and technological change.​

The man is always there: a child of working-class immigrants, an out gay man and the target of a bizarre shooting spree by one of his groupies. The show starts at the very beginning, in young Warhol’s Pittsburgh. It’s important to see him as what the catalogue calls “the quintessential American”. Coming from a working-class family who, by the way, he adored, Warhol was always an ambitious striver and a hard worker. He was his family’s first college graduate. Before long, he was in New York and a successful commercial artist specialising in fashion advertising.

One of the most memorable galleries is surely a recreation of The Silver Factory as a vital, real hub for the creative and the insiders. Rock music, dark galleries, and a dense hang of black and white photographs by the young Stephen Shore gave me as close to a “being there” feeling.

It is surely be a nice exhibition to introduce Warhol to a new generation and keeps the conversation going!

Andy Warhol, Tate Modern, London, until 15 November