Eugene Mackaben

Eugene Henry Mackaben (June 28, 1920 – January 3, 1984) was a prominent figure in the development of regional Post-WWII American Southwest modern art. His education in Chicago, coupled with artistic development in Mexico under the guidance of muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and influence from other major figures within Mexican Modern Art and Mexican Muralism, created a distinctive style that matured in Tucson, Arizona. As an art educator, he influenced a generation of students, taught for numerous years at the University of Arizona, and offered public instructional classes. His paintings, prints, and drawings were continuously shown in southern Arizona throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, gaining national recognition and receiving numerous awards.

Education MacKaben was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1920. and continued to show regionally and locally throughout the 1950s with the Tucson Fine Arts Association.

Following a 1954 show of western regional artists in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote: "The most individual of these artist is Mackaben who manages to use the devices of abstract art without a touch of solemnity. He paints the Arizona towns and people, fantastic rocks and desert landscape with a great deal of formal ingenuity and with a rather subtle palette, but always with gusto, whimsicality and humor."

In 1958 Mackaben received an award for his woodcut “Shapes of the Desert”, presented by the Tucson Fine Arts Association. He served as the arts and crafts supervisor in the Tucson school system while earning his master's degree in art from the University of Arizona.

In 1959 he began teaching art at the University of Arizona Fine Arts College, Pima Community College and conducted several workshops.

In 1960 his work “Punks” was featured in the Tucson Daily Citizen in conjunction with an exhibition at the Temple of Music and Art Galleries. In October of that year he showed as part of a University of Arizona Art Gallery faculty exhibition that included work by James Powell Scott, Warren Anderson, Douglas Dennison Maurice Grossman, Charles Littler and Andrew Rush. He received an honorable mention in the sculpture section of the Fine Arts Show at the Arizona State Fair in Phoenix in November 1960.

By 1963, he was given a one-man show of drawings, woodcuts, oils and lithographs at the Workshop Center of the Arts in Tucson. The semi-abstract works featured motifs of men and motor cars, "recreating his subjects with original and evocative expression and certain humor."

Tucson Daily Citizen art critic Alberta Friedlander wrote in conjunction with a 1972 solo exhibition that Mackaben's paintings are: "Social Realism, which reveals the customs and foibles of people in an exaggerated expressionist manner. At times his message is so broad as to border on cartooning. All are painted in very personal style and he uses acrylics in strong colors giving his canvases an overall textured surface with a tactile quality." A reviewer in 1974 saw a "slight debt to Ben Shahn" in Mackaben's recent paintings.

Always actively involved in the community and its diverse needs, including mental health care and the University of Arizona Museum of Art (Desert Shapes By Moonlight (1956), and Black Is Beautiful (c. 1949)).

Legacy His work was included in the 1998 exhibition, Tucson's Early Moderns, 1945–1965 held at the University of Arizona Museum of Art.