s time period stayed away from politics, there were still many artists who dealt with political matters. Throughout time, modernist artists have most often associated themselves with liberal, radical, and sometimes revolutionary political positions when they are not apolitical or neutral in their social and political views . Many politically slanted works were shown in the sixties, but most of these were of little lasting aesthetic value . Yet, one place where politics was abundant in art in the 1960s was in African-American art. This was because of the militant black struggle against racism and for Civil Rights during this time period. But modernist art was not a place where African-American art was found. Black art of the 1950s and 1960s is indeed its own style completely and belongs in an account outside of modernism. It seems though that artists generally put themselves rather than their art into politics. For example, in 1965, there was a full page article in the New York Times under the headline, End Your Silence signed by more than 500 artists and influential art-oriented persons and calling for a protest against both the Vietnam War and the US intervention in the Dominican Republic . Although many people saw Pop art as nothing more than the flaccid capitulation to the commercial materialism that modernism had always resisted , many of the artists including Andy Warhol, may have hidden politics in their complex, nuanced, and ironic art. For example, were Warhols repetitive silk-screen images of race-riots, automobile disasters and electric chairs mere bids for publicity and bourgeois titillation, or were they efforts to demonstrate the desensitizing effect of the endlessly repeated scenes of horror in the press and on the tube? Was he just taking things from popular culture and utilizing them in art, or was he commenting on them? This forces a new analysis of Pop art. Is there a deeper meaning to these simple, commonplace objec...
