You might think you’ve seen enough Andy Warhol to last a lifetime. When I first heard about the full-dress Whitney Museum retrospective of his work that opens Monday, it sounded a bit gratuitous. These are dire times in America, these Trump years. It’s an odd moment to be asked to take a new look at Warhol, the bewigged Pop artist and Studio 54 habitué whose body composition appeared to consist of 99 percent Perrier and one percent fat.

Yet the Whitney Museum and curator Donna De Salvo are to be congratulated for assembling a remarkably handsome and topical show. “Andy Warhol: A to B and Back again” brings us a Warhol who seems less interested in celebrity worship than in such serious and timely subjects as abstract vs. figurative painting, gay yearning, and gun violence. Although the show includes dozens of his society portraits, they’re sequestered in a lobby gallery, away from the main part of the show. This is wise. They are probably the weakest part of Warhol’s output, if only because they’re so formulaic, with their legions of famous, color-streaked faces gazing out from uniformly 40-inch-square canvases.

The fifth floor of the museum, by contrast, is reserved for Warhol at his most daring and geniusy. It still astounds, after all these decades, to walk from one gallery to the next and watch Warhol metamorphose almost overnight from a commercial illustrator who specialized in charming, blotted-ink drawings of designer shoes into a major artist. That happened in 1962, when he began silk-screening photographic images onto his canvases. The technique allowed him to invent a new kind of painting, combining and recombining the same images – the Mona Lisa, S & H Green Stamps, photo-booth portraits of the sunglass-sporting art collector Ethel Scull – without end. Warhol’s use of repeating frames remains, I think, his greatest innovation. His works from the early ‘60s tend to celebrate the bounty and plenty of American consumerism as well as the numbness that too-muchness can induce.

Going through the show, I was surprised, at times, by the scale of the paintings. They stand as tall as fifteen feet. After years of seeing Warhol’s work miniaturized on refrigerator magnets, post cards and note pads, it is easy to forget that many of his paintings have the heroic scale of the Abstract Expressionist paintings of the ‘50s. He can put you in mind of the abstract painters Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, with their sweeping expanses of red and orange. This matters, reminding us that behind his affectless, gee-whiz façade, Warhol harbored grand ambitions for his art – ambitions that are given their full due in this retrospective.