“I think he would have loved this age,” Jordan Love, the academic curator and co-interim director of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, said of the pop-art master, who died in 1987.

Interest in Warhol’s art, both for its content and its execution, is as strong as ever in large part because the message he so consistently conveyed is as true now as it was decades ago.

Through Sept. 18, The Fralin will showcase a small collection of Warhol pieces that is centered on defining characteristics of his career.

“Andy Warhol: Icons” features three dozen pieces displayed in two galleries on the upper level of the museum. Curator Rebecca Schoenthal built the show around a small collection of prints the museum received as a gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

The focus is squarely on the idea of notoriety as it existed in the 1950s and ’60s, when Warhol was making his name in art. He would often take an existing image of a celebrity and eliminate or soften defining details, then colorize it in his own style and produce copy after copy.

“It’s how he understood the intersection of art and commodity,” Love said. “This is how he understood the explosion of mass production.”

That intersection of celebrity and mass consumption defines the show.

There are four versions of Warhol’s iconic image of Marilyn Monroe, based on a movie studio publicity shot from the 1950s.

Another four pieces depict queens who have appeared on currency, including the United Kingdom’s Elizabeth. “It’s a literal example of the commodification of celebrity,” Love said.

Jackie Kennedy is there, too, in the pillbox hat she wore the day her husband, President John F. Kennedy Jr., was shot in Dallas.

Venus is also represented, Warhol pulling inspiration, and an image, from Botticelli, the Italian Renaissance painter.

Perhaps the most interesting of the presentations is a series of prints based on a 15th-century Italian painting of St. Apollonia, a minor martyr from the third century who died after a forced conversion that involved the extraction of her teeth failed, and she instead kept her faith, and found her death, by jumping into a fire.

Warhol used part of that image to fashion his own, turning a 15th-century icon into an icon for the 20th century.

In the smaller of the two galleries, there are 13 images about the marketing of the Wild West as a consumer product.

“He approached the idea of the American West as an icon,” Love said. “It was something that was created, branded and sold, without it being totally accurate.”

Many of the images in the three series displayed in that room came from promotion material from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the traveling show about life in the West starring people who had been there (and came back with perhaps exaggerated stories).

The collection also includes President Teddy Roosevelt.

“He was the first president to really market himself,” Love said. “Who remembers (Benjamin) Harrison or (William) McKinley? They came before him.”

Taken as a whole, the prints also elicit conversation of another defining aspect of Warhol’s career: ownership of images. Warhol admittedly borrowed images from others to create his own. The concept so vexed collectors after the artist’s death, the foundation that controlled his work created something called the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The board has since ceased operation, but the topic hasn’t gone away.

“There were a number of artists at the time who began questioning the ideas of artistry and authorship,” Love said. “As a society, we really want to attribute genius to one person. There’s evidence with the masters, people like Michelangelo, that they had help,” she said.

Assistants might do the backgrounds, she said, then the master would come in and paint the major details.

“But we think of it as a Michelangelo,” Love said. “Warhol and some others, like Sol LeWitt” — one of his “kit paintings” is on the first floor of the gallery — “began to challenge what it meant. They were playing with the ideas of authenticity and authorship.

“Was it enough to create the idea, or did you have to do all the work, too?”

There are also five of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup boxes, pieces the artists used in his never-ending quest to introduce pop culture and mass production into the world of fine art.

“He was definitely trying to thumb his nose at the establishment,” Love said.