By Paul Majendie

EDINBURGH (Reuters Life!) - Novelist Gore Vidal once labelled Andy Warhol "a genius with the IQ of a moron". On the 20th anniversary of his death, the artist has had the last laugh.

Those 15 minutes of fame have certainly lasted for Warhol, a consummate chronicler of 20th century icons who admitted: "Art is what you can get away with."

His works are setting auction records and a new show at Scotland's National Gallery Complex is proving to be one of the big hits in Edinburgh over its annual arts festival.

"It's one of the biggest openings we have ever had," a Gallery spokeswoman said, as crowds queued for "Andy Warhol: A Celebration of Life ... and Death."

Critics may dismiss Warhol as a celebrity-obsessed triumph of style over substance, but in May a car crash painting sold in New York for an auction record for his work of $71.7 million.

Keith Hartley, curator of the Edinburgh exhibition, is no doubt that Warhol was one of the seminal artists of the last century.

"He almost invented celebrity culture, first of all in the Sixties by celebrating the icons of the day like Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor and then in the Seventies and Eighties by doing commissioned portraits -- Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, Truman Capote etc."

The exhibition takes as its theme one of the turning points in Warhol's life in the early Sixties.

Museum curator and friend Henry Geldzahler told him: "That's enough affirmation of life -- of soup and Coke. Maybe everything isn't always fabulous in America. It's time for some death."

Hartley, sitting in a room full of skull paintings, told Reuters: "This ushered in a whole series of paintings about death and disaster.

"Visually Warhol was incredibly intelligent and had an incredibly keen eye for what was important at a particular time -- Marilyn Monroe's suicide, Kennedy's assassination, Nixon's trip to China."

The exhibition is peppered with instantly recognisable images from Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger to Judy Garland and Dolly Parton.

But it also offers insight into other facets of Warhol -- screen tests he shot of visitors to his New York "Factory", exquisite line drawings from his early days and boxes of ephemera that the notorious hoarder refused to throw away.

Hartley, reflecting on his legacy, said: "He had his finger on the pulse and brought a radical form of realism back to art.

"He understood the importance of the modern age -- mass production, mass communication and everything being repeated again and again."