NEW YORK.- Andy Warhol’s Mustard Race Riot, 1963, an extremely rare, powerful and provocative image from the artist’s Death and Disaster series, was the highlight of Christie’s evening sale of Post-War and Contemporary Art on November 10 at Rockefeller Center. The work sold for $15 million at Christie's auction house.

Signs of Separation: The Socio-Political Climate of Andy Warhol's Mustard Race Riot (1963) - The tumultuous history of the fight for civil rights had been laid long before the appearance of Charles Moore's 1963 photographs in Life magazine, and their appropriation by Andy Warhol for his painting Mustard Race Riot produced in the same year. By the end of World War II, race relations had, in fact, occupied a central position in American life and politics. The historical reasons for this are many and include the impact of the vast demographic shift of African- Americans from the rural South to the industrialized centers of the North between 1915 and 1960; white flight to suburbs; the Cold War; the advent of television and a growing sophistication of media coverage; and the resurgence of black African nationalism. The 1950s and 1960s were volatile decades in which racial tension and social unrest dominated the lives and preoccupied the thoughts and actions of blacks and whites in the southern states, where Jim Crow laws and segregation policies were institutionalized. These laws, under the claim of "separate but equal," legally separated blacks from whites in the areas of education, housing, employment, public transportation, hospitals, libraries, courts, and even cemeteries. These were attempts by whites to deny the rights of citizenship to African-Americans by barring them from all areas of social and political life, and to instill in them a sense of fear and inferiority. The visual indicators of separation were everywhere in most southern states, particularly in public accommodations and in transportation services. Printed signboards marked "white" and "colored" dotted most public facilities such as toilets, restaurants, hospitals, waiting rooms, and water fountains.