KANSAS CITY -- A giant Campbell's Soup can stands outside Union Station, an almost universally recognized sign pointing the way to a show of art by Andy Warhol.

When Warhol painted the cans in 1961, they were greeted by derision. Nearly five decades later, the cans are iconic, the works most identified with the best known, the most popular and, arguably, most important artist of the past 50 years.

The show inside the old train station is "Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life & Legends," made up of more than 80 prints from the Bank of America Collection. Needless to say, it has been a hit since it went on view in early October.

"It's really been pretty remarkable to me," curator Christopher Leitch said. "I've noticed people from all walks of life, all know who Warhol is and all are familiar with what he made. We've had senior citizens groups and grade-school art classes and everyone in between. They've been opened up to art, introduced to art with Andy Warhol."

That opening up continues to occur because Warhol made art that he cleverly called "commonism" - that is, taking everyday objects and later newspaper and celebrity photographs and turning them into art. In doing so, Warhol turned the art world upside down, conflating "high" and "low" culture, creating pieces that were instantly grasped by anyone who had been in a grocery store yet contained all the elements of art.

Warhol didn't work in a vacuum, drawing on the neo-Dada work of Robert Rauschenberg and, especially, Jasper Johns, whose flag and target paintings took flat, everyday objects and reproduced them on canvas. Warhol painted his Coca-Cola bottles and soup cans in much the same manner.

At the same time Warhol was defining his revolutionary work, Roy Lichtenstein was working with comic book/comic strip images (as was Warhol), Claes Oldenburg was making small, odd-shaped sculptures of consumer items and selling them in "The Store," and James Rosenquist was blowing up everyday objects to a giant scale. That work and those artists became the core of Pop Art, with Warhol almost instantly overshadowing them all.

Fittingly, the first print on view in the large exhibition hall on the station's former underground train platform is a 1967 "Marilyn," one of the many reproductions he did of Marilyn Monroe with bright red lips, brightly colored eye shadow and hair and slightly misaligned screens creating enduring images of the glamorous, but troubled movie star.

When Warhol began painting Monroe and Elvis Presley, he was again derided by those who said the work would lose any meaning it had once Marilyn and Elvis faded from memory. But Warhol, for all his superficiality, both real and put-on, identified and produced enduring icons - people, commercial products and designs, such as the hammer and sickle.

Nor was he entirely about soup and stars. The other single print in the exhibition is a stark reproduced photograph of "Birmingham Race Riot" from 1964, part of his haunting "Death and Disaster" series that was created after the initial success of his cheery Pop imagery.

For most artists, seeing a show of prints would be a far different experience from looking at their paintings. But Warhol isn't most artists. He created his paintings mechanically through the silk-screen process now commonly used to emblazon T-shirts with lettering and imagery. He used the same techniques to create his works on paper.

"The difference in media (canvas and paper) and price aside, one can't really make a qualitative distinction between Warhol's paintings and his prints," write Tony Scherman and David Dalton in "Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol." "His paintings were prints, if laboriously produced, the same technique, screen printing was used for both. Andy painted or had painted more than one-third as many "Flowers" as were printed (900 paintings, 250 print editions, of 10 samples each). It wasn't just printmaking's new profitability that drew Andy; it was also the conceptual play, the upending of fixed ideas."

To make a comparison between Warhol's prints and paintings in Kansas City, just drive a few blocks to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Hanging in its pop art gallery is "Baseball," very likely the first silk- screen painting Warhol made from a photograph. Created in July or August, 1962, "Baseball" contains more than 30 repetitions of a newspaper photo of Roger Maris hitting his record-setting 61st home run, the images becoming progressively darker and less distinct as the screen filled with ink.

The vast majority of the prints on view at Union Station were produced after June 3, 1968, the date on which Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanis, a mentally ill radical feminist who believed he controlled too much of her life. Warhol "died" in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, was revived but given little chance of survival. He recovered, but his art and outlook changed following his "first death."

The freewheeling Factory of the mid-'60s was long gone, replaced by an enterprise that pursued portrait commissions and made suites of prints as Warhol moved into what he called "business art."

"Business art is the step that comes after Art," he wrote in 1975's "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; From A to B and Back Again." "I started as a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art."

Critic Arthur Danto, among the most perceptive analysts of Warhol, sees "business art" like this in his new book, "Andy Warhol":

"Typically, it consisted in a suite of prints (and of paintings) made for money. When he painted the soup cans, people widely felt that no one in their right minds would buy them. But handsome images of famous athletes and endangered species seemed made to order for the waiting room walls of successful professionals or the lobbies of expensive hotels. The business art seemed made for the sake of business."

Hence, the preponderance of Warhol portfolios in the Bank of America Collection and the traveling exhibition, which is showing for the first time in the Midwest at Union Station.

Even though his pieces were commercially produced, Warhol nonetheless captured some of the same wonder and insight in the '70s and '80s prints that he did in his '60s prime.

The 1978 "Muhammad Ali" series, created from Polaroid photos Warhol took the year before, captures the Greatest of All Time at his late peak, Ali's charisma jumping off the paper. The 1989 "Endangered Species" series uses bright colors - a red, yellow, white, blue and purple zebra, a red panda and a brown Siberian tiger - to draw attention to the animals by their very unreality.

But the true masterworks of the portfolio series are in "Myths" from 1981. Here's how Danto sees the "Myths" portfolio:

"The images were drawn entirely from popular culture: a movie star, (Greta Garbo as Mata Hari), Superman, Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus as the forces of good, Dracula and the Wicked Witch of the West as forces of darkness, Uncle Sam as ambiguous as between goodness and wickedness, Aunt Jemima as the emblem of our daily bread, and of course, Andy himself as the Shadow, who sees all and knows all."

Dusted with crushed diamonds, the "Myths" prints shimmer as they captivate with the familiarity of Pop and the juxtaposition of icons not usually seen together. As he did two decades earlier, Warhol tapped into the essence of common culture and found ways to make it new and revealing - revelation that continues today, nearly three decades after "Myths" was produced and 22 years after the artist's death.

"Myths" is also of particular interest to Nebraskans as "Myths: Mickey Mouse," a 1981 four-panel synthetic polymer paint and silk-screen ink on canvas of the same Mickey Mouse from the print portfolio is the only Warhol painting in the Sheldon Museum of Art collection.

Because of its narrow focus on prints, "Andy Warhol Portfolios: Life & Legends" has no representation of the other Warhol earthquake that continues to shake the art world.

In 1964, Warhol unveiled his "Brillo Boxes," exact copies on wood of the cardboard boxes used to transport Brillo soap pads to stores.

In creating his boxes for Brillo and other products, Warhol raised the question, in Danto's words, of "What made Andy's boxes art, while their real-life counterparts were simply utilitarian containers, with no claim to the status of art at all?"

In answering that question - that art essentially is what an artist says it is, the product of a creative choice and intention - Warhol undermined the entire philosophy of art that preceded him, eliminating visual considerations, pushing aside "the good, the true and the beautiful" and striking the first blow for pluralist post-modernism that continues today.

That philosophical turn isn't likely of concern to the kids and grandparents who flock to see Warhol exhibitions. Nor does it likely mean all that much to collectors who have kept prices for Warhol's work astronomically high as the rest of the art market has bottomed out. Earlier this month, his monumental 1962 painting "200 One Dollar Bills" sold at auction for $43.76 million.

Rather what those crowds, prices and the continuing run of scholarly and popular books about him indicate is Warhol's unprecedented continuing popularity with both the masses and the art elite. He is THE artist of the past 50 years and, for many reasons, it is always a good thing to see multiple examples of his work to remind us why.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.