A pivotal figure of modern art

Warhol's name is still what Hollywood calls "box-office magic," and this exhibition has caught public interest and appears to be well attended. It covers a great deal of ground and is a useful summation of his style or styles, though it is rather short of actual masterworks - Warhol, like most artists with a high production rate, is highly uneven and sometimes he even falls into commercial kitsch. He turned them out, in fact, he had assistants and his famous Factory was close to being just that - a production line.

The earliest works shown are drawings, including some odd things by Warhol's even odder mother, Julia Warhola, who came to live with him in New York and was the source of some social embarrassment. Warhol's own drawings are gifted, mannered and faintly reminiscent of the early Hockney. Soon the familiar subjects of the early canvases begin to appear: Coca-Cola bottles, the Campbell's soup cans, then some of the "Disaster" series including the tragic Jackie Kennedy at her husband's funeral and multiples of the tuna-fish tins which poisoned somebody-or-other.

By this time we are launched, and there are two small rooms papered over with the famous "Cow wallpaper" and with multiple heads of Chairman Mao. There is even a room full of the silver balloons of the kind Warhol showed at the Louis Castelli Gallery in 1966 (visitors were enjoying them when I passed through) and a heap of the Heinz cardboard containers, which now seem a period gimmick. There are enlarged comic strips, one of the large, impressive Skull paintings, various dollar-sign pictures, and a massive and faintly sinister self-portrait staring at you from an end-wall. The big Last Supper from 1986 I find meretricious, though it has been not only highly influential, but prophetic of the entire range of pastiche pictures which today we know too, too well.

This adds up to plenty of Warhol, though visitors may be left with the partial impression that he was a rather mechanical, even a dull colourist - which is very far from the truth. His enormous influence has been indirect as well as direct; the cool, depersonalising aesthetic of the Minimalists must surely owe him something, and the Photorealists must too. Warhol has been a pivotal figure in the art of the last 30 years, so the question now is whether or not, after a deluge of Pop culture and Pop imagery in all the arts, we need a major change. This particular tendency seems to me to have gone as far as it can legitimately go.

In effect, Warhol helped to make visual art a form of Showbiz, something which is now threatening to swamp painting in particular and art in general. His cult of the ephemeral and of consumer imagery was valid for himself, but his successors and imitators have now run it into the ground, so perhaps it is time to reverse the trend and to swing back to what used to be called High Art. Perhaps, after so much populism and commercialism, we even need a counter-cult of the hieratic and esoteric, in order to restore the balance. Stranger things have happened in art before, since most things go according to the unwritten law of reaction.

Runs until March 22nd.