Perhaps it is too indelicate, or not academic enough, to highlight Warhol’s appeal merely by virtue of his ubiquity. Certainly the catalogue is exhaustive, but it needn’t have tried so hard. The mere fact of Warhol’s reputation is as impressive as it needs to be. How he achieved this is revealed in the exhibition, and it is one of the Whitney’s chief achievements here.

The last major American exhibition of Warhol’s work took place back in 1989, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which seems surprising, and endows the Whitney’s endeavor with timely properness. It might also explain an incongruous curatorial blemish at the beginning of the chronological design in the fifth floor galleries, where the bulk of the exhibition is. What appears to be the first room presents not Warhol’s earliest work, but some of his most famous, including Brillo Boxes (1969), which is a version of the 1964 original installation, and his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, from 1962. It seems a dip in confidence to begin with a reminder of something that nobody has forgotten.

After those greatest hits, though, the show backs up to explore Warhol’s commercial work in the 1950s as an illustrator for designers (I. Miller & Sons), fashion magazines (Glamour), and department stores (Bonwit Teller); his illustrative work also extended to media organizations and even the pharmaceutical industry. It is the most important section of the exhibition because it reveals Warhol’s experimental attempts and stumbles as he sought a fine art aesthetic out of his professional experience. This trove includes a quite magnificent series of gold, mixed-media collages of ladies shoes incorporating metal leaf and ink on paper. These were made in 1956, and exhibited at Bodley Gallery in New York the same year. Intended as portraits of prominent names in fashion or society, they almost dance off the page with joie de vivre.