Untitled
c. 1963
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
pastel on wove paper
Dimensions
overall: 27.9 x 21.6 cm (11 x 8 1/2 in.)
Classification
Drawing
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of The George R. Bunker Living Trust
Accession Number
1995.58.16
Art Historical Context
George Bunker's *Untitled* (c. 1963) invites viewers into the intimate world of mid-20th-century drawing, captured in soft pastel on wove paper. This modest sheet, measuring just 27.9 x 21.6 cm (11 x 8½ in.), reflects the exploratory spirit of postwar American art, when artists often embraced abstraction and personal expression amid cultural shifts like the Space Age and civil rights movements. Bunker's choice of an untitled work underscores the medium's immediacy—pastels allow for spontaneous layering of pigment, blending hues with fingertips or tools for ethereal effects unachievable in oils...
About the Artist
George Bunker
George Raymond Bunker (1923–1991) was an American painter and educator whose deeply felt engagement with landscape placed him in a tradition stretching from Cézanne's Provençal motifs to the meditative abstraction of mid-twentieth-century American art. Born in 1923, Bunker built a distinguished career as both an artist and an institution builder, holding high academic positions at two important ar...