Jane Addams Allen Guthrie, 1935-2004 - Artworld - Obituary

Art in America, April, 2004 by Janet Koplos

Jane Addams Allen Guthrie, critic, editor and art historian, died of cancer Jan. 31 in Cornwall, England, age 68. From 1971 to '73, in her natal city, Allen wrote criticism for the Chicago Tribune, and from 1982 to '89 she was the art critic for the Washington Times and Insight magazine. She also contributed to Art in America, Studio International, American Craft and other publications. But she is best known for co-founding Chicago's New Art Examiner with the British painter and critic Derek Guthrie, whom she later married.

The Examiner began as a local magazine with national ambitions, showing a particular interest in the politics and value systems of the art world and encouraging a wide range of contributions. It started in 1973 as a four-page tabloid but eventually became a color magazine, in the process incorporating reports and reviews from other Midwestern locations and then the East Coast as well. Allen and Guthrie, who relocated to Washington, D.C., in the early '80s to better report on the National Endowment for the Arts, were reluctant to yield to the usual New York dominance and retained a regional orientation. They were adept at nurturing critics, and among the Examiners "graduates" are Alice Thorson, Eleanor Heartney, Jerry Saltz, Robert Storr--and myself.

For me, Jane was both a mentor and a model as an independent woman. At one time I described her as the most intellectual woman I knew. She was always motivated by ideas and a public sense of responsibility, perhaps inherited from her great aunt and namesake Jane Addams, the social worker who established Chicago's Hull House. But she was never narrow in her focus: she also raised a daughter; she and Guthrie labored on the restoration of a row house in Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood; and after moving to Great Britain in 1996--in part because the couple had no health insurance in the U.S.--she became involved in environmental and social campaigns.

Allen earned a B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Chicago and began a Ph.D. in the history of culture. Among her awards were two art critic's grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Renwick Fellowship from the Smithsonian, a Manufacturers Hanover award for excellence in art criticism and a Chicago Art Award for investigative reporting. Although she was distant in time and space from the American art world at the time of her death, her influence lingers.