Andy Warhol at Tate Modern in a mask

The Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern has been extended so I thought, 'why not?' and headed up to Tate Modern to join the queue to get in, enmasked of course. I suspect he would've loved masks for various reasons and I was a bit surprised there weren't any for sale in the exhibition shop.

I'm not the biggest Warhol fan but I set up a Warhol playlist on my iPod to get me in the mood. 'Songs for Drella' (of course), some Velvet Underground, songs about him from Bowie and others, songs about New York and about art, all sorts of stuff. The first song to pop up was John Cale's 'Trouble with Classicists' from 'Drella' that seemed like a perfect start to the journey up to Tate Modern.

I got there a bit early but masked up and joined the short queue outside for the exhibition and then the longer queue inside on the third floor to get into the exhibition itself. It was all very efficient and safe so well done to the Tate and staff for making it so easy to get in.

The first room has a series of over a dozen line drawings of androgynous young men but the second room is where the blockbusters begin, with Marilyn, Elvis, soup cans, coke bottles and Brillo pad boxes. I stood there looking at the pile of Brillo pad boxes and wondered if they were in the right order, the right shape? And then decided that it didn't really matter, I'm pretty sure that Warhol didn't bother with a diagram to show how the pile of boxes should be put together.

As you'd expect for a media cult figure in the '60s and '70s, there are lots of photographs to look at and I really liked this photo of Andy and Lou Reed in the '60s - how young Lou looks. It's good to include exhibits like this in the exhibition to show how broad Warhol's ambition was and how he tried to connect all branches of the arts by wanting his own rock band to project his films onto. Weird stuff but that was the '60s for you. And, of course, the mandatory sunglasses.

On the opposite wall is the screen print of Elizabeth Taylor hung on a silver wall.

I did like the way the Tate has played out these rooms. Liz Taylor is hung on a wall covered in silver bacofoil, nice and shiny, and then later, the Mao screenprint is hung on a wall covered in Mao heads. I did wonder for a moment whether that was meant to be art as well and then decided it didn't really matter.

Most things were on a big scale so some rooms didn't have many works in them. In the current circumstances that seems very sensible indeed.

I didn't bother waiting in a queue to see the thin corridor that covered the time when Valerie Solanas shot Andy and all the smaller exhibits, like newspaper cuttings in glass cases, but walked straight through to avoid too many people. That room could do with a rethink, I suspect.  I did quite like the room full of 'drag and trans' prints that had a sign at the door that explained that 'drag and trans' had different meanings back in the late 60s and 70s, which I thought was quite sweet. It sort of reflects the people Warhol hung out with, an inclusive scene rather than anything else. Did he mean that as a political gesture or was it just that they were good subjects, or good fun at the time? Whatever, they're good to look at and there are some interesting experiments in colour and shape in his portraits. I wonder what they thought about being his subjects? Was it an honour or a pain or did they care at all?

I really liked Warhol's portraits of Lenin, the great Russian revolutionary, a perfect subject to enrage at the time. You can't see it in my photo but theres an electric blue outline around Lenin's face in the darker print. Lenin is relatively young in the photograph he copied for these large portraits and you can well imagine him being responsible for a revolution. I wonder how many of these prints he actually produced  before deciding that he was happy with the final versions?

In this room there's also a glass case that includes three of his wigs. They looked a bit scruffy and manky to me but he was happy to wear them.

There are his celebrity portraits, of course, epitomised by two prints of Mick Jagger and two of Debbie Harry. It's probably an age thing but I was more excited to see Debbie than I was to see Mick.  They are very simple as prints but it's obvious who they are.

Jagger is from 1975 (hence the slash of make-up) and Debbie is from 1980 when she was probably the most famous woman in the world, full-on pout and direct gaze.

The final room is darkened and has one work on show across an entire wall, 'Sixty Last Suppers', based on an old photograph of Leonardo's 'Last Super' in Milan. It's in black and white and shows a degraded version of the famous painting. The signage refers to his partner dying of an AIDS-related illness around the time he produced it and it is quite sombre but there's also the hope of the resurrection a few days later. I suspect part of the sombre tone comes from the subdued lighting rather than the subject matter. I admit to being one of those annoying people that gets too close to the work as I tried to identify what was different from this version to that version five prints along in the series.

I enjoyed the exhibition. I don't think I learned anything about Warhol from it but I've already booked another ticket to see it again.