Charles Ragland Bunnell

Who was Charles Ragland Bunnell?

Charles Ragland Bunnell, 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 artist from 1934 to 1941 he executed many commissioned murals in a sturdy, somewhat abstracted figurative style. He was also noted for his colorful Western landscapes. Later he become particularly known for bold abstracts in a cubist-influenced idiom, tending eventually toward abstract expressionism, the style in which he worked from about the 1950s until his death. Marika Herskovic's American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s : an Illustrated Survey, provides an accounting of this period in Bunnell's stylistic evolution. His work 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.