Andy Warhol's death, 13 years ago, was an ignominious one: A man who had access to the best medical care, Warhol died after a routine but botched gall bladder operation.

Pop artist, experimental filmmaker and author of legendary quips, Warhol was also the Svengali behind the Velvet Underground, the Superstars of his movies and Interview magazine, a fashion periodical created to stoke the egos of the rich and famous, and to drum up trade for portraits, Warhol's main source of revenue.

Unlike any other artist before, Warhol served up the banal regurgitated images of American cultural consumerism. His greatest work, however, was probably himself, a walking, talking self-promoting pop object.

While this piece is no longer on display, his plastic art remains, much of it within the Mugrabi Collection of 253 works, which is showing for the first time in Japan at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Shibuya. One of the biggest collections of Warhol's work, the exhibition runs the whole gamut of his output. Jose Mugrabi amassed this extensive collection because he felt Warhol embodied American culture, being the first artist to make a complete break away from European traditions.

The show takes us from Warhol's early 1950s commercial design illustrations of shoes and recipes, his Pop Art of the '60s, the famed silk-screened portraits and on through to his last works in the '80s. Among these are a small number of collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and the little-seen Children's Painting series.

The famous Campbell's soup cans and Brillo boxes are artfully stashed up along one wall in the second gallery. The second telling of an already spoken image, the Campbell's soup cans were described in Time magazine as "a series of 'portraits' in living color." There were no expressionist drips; they were an exact representation of something everyone knew. The series ensured Warhol's fame. "I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing," Warhol once explained, "and the soup can was it."

The slapdash silk-screen portraits are brilliant and vital when you stand in a gallery full of them. In the words of art historian Robert Rosenblum, the portraits revived the "crackle, glitter and chic of older traditions of society portraiture."

Everyone clamored to have "a Warhol" -- their Warhol, of themselves. Clients could even choose the colors and the size depended on what they wanted to pay. They were printed by his assistants at the Factory, stamped with his name, and became the ultimate high-end branded art product.

The late capitalist commercialism became the lingua franca and Pop Art, subversive in the '60s in opposition to high-minded Abstract Expressionism, signaled a death knell to the unresolved modernist tension between abstraction and figuration.

Warhol the man was seen as something of a cipher, a weird pale guy who lived with his mother and went to church. There was something unwholesome in the way he was perceived to feed off the people that populated the Factory. Campbell's soup company was worried about the type of PR they would actually be getting, having their brand name associated with Warhol.

The true identity and motivation of Warhol is still debated, mythologized and demonized as is the "value" of his work.

Critic Harold Rosenburg wrote that Warhol was important because he broke down established barriers. "In demonstrating that art today is a commodity of the art market, comparable to the commodities of other specialized markets, Warhol has liquidated the century-old tension between the serious artist and the majority culture."

But Australian art critic Robert Hughes questioned the cynical manufacture of art value: "To say that Andy Warhol is a famous artist is to utter the merest commonplace. But what kind of fame does he enjoy?"

The fact that a Warhol which sold for $100 in 1960 was sold at auction in 1999 for $1,652,500 would support Hughes' answer: "Warhol's work never ceases to prove its merits in the only place where merit shows, the market."

The images of electric chairs, car crashes, 38 dead Marilyns and a mourning Jackie all have an unmeasurable emblematic cachet when they are right in front of you, and from this vantage point in time. However, it would be misleading to assume that the pictures were an interpretation of the American scene; instead, they were a contemporary and neutral recording of it.

John Coplans, former editor of Artforum, applauded Warhol's dissociated gaze, writing that Warhol's work "almost by choice of imagery, it seems, forces us to squarely face the existential edge of our existence."

The unremarkable Children's Painting series from the early '80s is shown in a side gallery near the exit, but the exhibition ends pertinently enough with Warhol's pictures of the Last Supper, skeletons, the shimmering white 12 Mona Lisas (Reversal Series) and the black reversal series of Marilyn. Warhol's last self-portraits, done a year before his untimely death, stare out at you and are not much more alive than the skulls that hang nearby.

According to his diaries, dictated over the telephone to Pat Hacket, Warhol was somewhat depressed toward the end of his life. Jean-Michel Basquiat, '80s graffiti star whom he had befriended and collaborated with, had recently stopped seeing him. Strung out (and close to death himself), Basquiat had become paranoid that Warhol had used him to rejuvenate a flagging career.

The unusual portrait Warhol did of Basquiat in 1982, which he urinated all over to oxidize a metallic pigment into green spattered blobs, could easily be read as a parody. But in the voice of the diaries, Warhol cared for Basquiat, and missed him.

The ebb and flow of fashion and reputations is indicative of the art and life of Warhol. This exhibition, beautifully staged with a superb catalog, is significant in its chronicling of the well-known and more obscure work of Warhol, who is beyond a doubt the prevailing archivist of our times.