On February 6, 1989, the Museum of Modern Art opened Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, recorded in Wikidata as a MoMA exhibition running through May 2. The show arrived less than two years after Warhol's death and treated his paintings, films, photographs, publishing projects, and celebrity images as the work of a central postwar artist rather than merely a Pop-cultural phenomenon. Supporting sources on Warhol describe his role in Pop art, his use of mechanical reproduction, and his sustained attention to advertising, mass media, consumerism, and fame. The retrospective was therefore a canonizing museum event: it helped consolidate Warhol's reputation inside the modern-art museum at the same time that his market, foundation, and posthumous critical reception were rapidly expanding.
The retrospective reinforced Warhol's status as a defining artist of late twentieth-century visual culture.
