Andy Warhol looks a scream

Q. Huh

A. 'Hang him on my wall/Andy Warhol, Silver Screen/Can't tell them apart at all'. So sang David Bowie in perhaps the most famous of the numerous musical homages to the celebrated New York-based artist. What is evident in the song is the recognition that Warhol was much more than just an artist

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Q. So Warhol was as much a movement as an artist

A. His studio was called the Factory and he began producing identical machine-made images, thus leading one commentator to call him 'the Henry Ford of art'. The Factory famously became a magnet for many of the fringe elements of arty society, peopled with both the cream and the lees of the New York demi-monde.

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After 1962 he experimented with the silk-screen method that was to become his trade-mark.

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Q. Silk screen

A. Silk screen is a stencil process - also called serigraphy -�first developed around 1900. Mainly used in advertising and display work during its first half century, fine artists started to use the process the early 1950s.

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Q. How does it work

A. A fine-mesh screen on a frame serves as a support for either a cut paper stencil or areas blocked out with glue. The unstencilled area lets through inks or paint when brushed or rolled on to it, thus allowing the pigment to pass through on to a substrate. It is ideal for printing on difficult surfaces, such as bottles and T-shirts. It's with this method that Warhol produced some of his most celebrated works, such as Marilyn Diptych and Jackies.

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Q. So, what's going to happen in London

A. Tate Modern is going to host the largest retrospective of Warhol's work ever. Fifteen years after his death, Warhol's lusted-for fame - though he famously stated that everyone should be famous for 15 minutes, he craved a far greater recognition for himself - is as great as ever, and those who dismissed him as a flash in the pan or a charlatan are about to be proved wrong. If you doubt his - or at least his work's - iconic status, try and find one of the billboards currently looming over London and fail to be impressed.

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Q. Billboards

A. Yes. Fifty billboards featuring his most recognisable works have been leased in London to publicise the exhibition. Jackie Onassis watches the rush hour on the North Circular, Chairman Mao gazes paternally down on Clapham Junction and Marilyn Monroe pouts at the HMSS officers in the MI6 building in Vauxhall.

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Q. Does he deserve this level of attention

A. There are those who see in Warhol's work the quintessence of mid 20th-century America. No-one defined the mass-market can-do ethic better than the shy Ruthenian boy born into a poor family in Pittsburgh. As he said of his painting of cola bottles, 210 Coca-Cola Bottles, 'No amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking': this was egalitarian America as he saw it. The images of rampant consumerism - soup tins - and popular iconography - Elvis, Marilyn and James Dean - marketed by a Byzantine Catholic - Warhol regularly attended Mass - symbolise the dichotomy of the USA in its heyday like no other artist's work ever can.

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If nothing else, he's popular and populist, and everyone's heard of him - so, yes, he probably does deserve it.

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For details of the Tate exhibition go to http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/warhol.htm

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By Simon Smith