Transmitting Andy Warhol review a show of real pep, pace and force

Andy Warhol would have been 86 in August. His soup cans and dollar bills, Coke bottles and Brillo boxes are more than half a century old. An entire generation has grown up with his Marilyns and Maos; primary school children know how to imitate his style and he is the most widely exhibited of all 20th-century artists. A new take on Warhol, therefore, ought to be a contradiction in terms.

But Tate Liverpool has come up with a show of real pep, pace and force that puts the emphasis on Warhol as the great art-for-all pioneer, bent on finding the broadest public reach for culture. The history may be familiar, from the Factory where anyone could make art, to the production of films, records, magazines, mass-market ads and TV programmes; but the focus is not upon fame and fortune, or Warhol as art historys archetypal pop artist. One sees him instead as the coal miners son from Pittsburgh, moving with extraordinary prescience and asperity through the whole image-flow of American society.