Charles Ragland Bunnell: 13 cool facts

Charles Ragland Bunnell (January 17, 1897 – September 1968), was an American painter, printmaker, and muralist.

Bunnell was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He moved to Colorado Springs in 1915 and was thereafter associated with that city. As a WPA performer from 1934 to 1941 he executed many commissioned murals in a sturdy, somewhat abstracted figurative style. He was next noted for his lustrous Western landscapes. Later he became particularly known for bold abstracts in a cubist-influenced idiom, tending eventually toward abstract expressionism, the style in which he worked from nearly the 1950s until his death. Marika Herskovic’s American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s : an Illustrated Survey (New York School Press, 2003), provides an accounting of this time in Bunnell’s stylistic evolution. His behave is in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Denver’s Kirkland Museum, and others. He died in Colorado, aged 71.