No account of Derek Guthrie—who assisted Jane Addams Allen in founding the New Art Examiner and soon became indelibly associated with it—is simple. As I tried to hack a path through the thickets of conflicting information about the Examiner for a forthcoming book, my understanding of Derek and Jane has changed considerably.

 

        My first encounter with Derek was when he called to invite me to write for the Examiner when I moved from Minnesota to the Chicago area in 1978. I met Jane after I arrived, but I didn’t begin to know her until I organized a theme issue in 1980, worked with her on the editing, and briefly stayed with her and Derek in Hyde Park. I always felt like a visitor to Chicago because I lived first in the distant suburbs and then in Peoria. Derek was the one who would call to say hello and to encourage me, and, when I was in the city, would take me along to the coffee shop to meet others in the Examiner world.

        I now recognize that Derek was the schmoozer, the outreach, the examiner of what was going on. Jane, meanwhile, was laboring away at actually putting the tabloid together. She was also an examiner of sorts, but more through her own writing. I have also come to realize that because he was the “front man” (Ann Lee Morgan’s apt observation) and because Jane left the editorship to earn a living wage when they were in Washington, her preeminent role began to be forgotten. After her death in 2004, Derek tried to persuade me to write a history of the Examiner by asserting that Jane didn’t get the credit she deserved. He was absolutely right. In the beginning she had the leadership position and brought him in. Yet he became the more visible figure, particularly in the 1980s, and his talk about the Examiner increasing became “I” rather than “we.” Yet they were intensely collaborative in some ways, constantly discussing what they thought of issues, both aesthetic and political. She lauded his insights and recognized his difficulty at organizing or developing those ideas, especially as time went by. She worked without credit on some articles that were given his byline alone, and she supported the desire for recognition that motivated him.

        Derek wasn’t a keeper of records, and he was estranged from his family, so hard biographical data such as dates is not always available. But his story—as much as he was willing to tell—goes something like this: he was born in England, the only child of a policeman and his unstable wife, who died when Derek was 24. He was a bright child, but undiagnosed dyslexia made school under the regime of Christian Brothers a trauma. He went to the West of England College of Art, his studies interrupted by a short-lived marriage and becoming the father of a son at the age of 19. Sometime in his early 20s he dropped his father’s last name in favor of his mother’s maiden name, which he thought more fitting for an artist.

 

        Around that time, he also suffered an emotional breakdown and endured electroshock therapy. He returned to school and met his second wife, with whom he later had a daughter. He first visited St. Ives, Cornwall as a student and later lived there for three years. His paintings, influenced by the buildings, land, sea and light there, had sell-out shows at a London gallery as well as a show at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. He lived for a time in London, more briefly in Paris, and two years in India on a Commonwealth Scholarship before his wife’s work brought them to Chicago in 1969.

        He set to work to find teaching and exhibiting opportunities. Derek and Jane met when both were teaching at Chicago State University. He had one reviewed show in Chicago, of rather dark paintings, before setting his art aside for the succession of language-centered activities to which Jane introduced him. The first of these was the Chicago branch of the New Art Association, a national activist organization founded in 1970 with chapters in several major cities. Jane was president and Derek vice president of the Chicago chapter. After she, in that role, testified before a state commission on arts financing, she was invited to be the art critic for the Chicago Tribune. She agreed but said she wanted to write collaboratively with Derek.

         For 20 months, 1971–73, they wrote weekly reviews and created listings for the daily paper, and wrote longer, often investigative pieces for the Tribune’s Sunday magazine before being fired, probably for stepping on toes. They made an immediate pivot, writing a feature article for ArtNews on the Imagists’ participation in the São Paulo Biennial that year. When that was killed—likely because of pressure from gallerist and advertiser Phyllis Kind—they published it in Studio International, a British periodical.

 

        But even before that story was on the newsstands, the first issue of the New Art Examiner was published in October 1973. For the first two years, the staff consisted of volunteers, mostly other members of the CNAA plus a dedicated coterie of Derek’s painting students from night-school classes at Northwestern. The first issue listed Jane as editor and Derek was just one of the five-person editorial staff. In the second issue, he was listed as Associate Editor. Publishing at first out of Jane’s Hyde Park apartment, they defined the lasting characteristics of the Examiner, beginning with critical articles on the practices of the Illinois Arts Council and targeting the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago—in essence attacking every center of power in the Chicago art world. Their skeptical, questioning attitude toward “the establishment”—later including the National Endowment for the Arts—lasted as long as Derek remained with the magazine. They moved to Washington, D.C., in 1980 to establish an East Coast presence for the Examiner and for financial reasons. He claimed they were blacklisted from teaching in Chicago, and the Examiner didn’t provide a living for them. At that time, Derek was designated publisher. Two years later, still barely keeping their heads above water, Jane took a position as art critic for the Washington Times which sustained them but necessitated resigning as the Examiner editor. But she still had to back him up on the Examiner board, help with his writing, strategize fundraisers, and more.

 

        Derek could be funny and charming, and he was good at attracting people to work for the Examiner. He was good at drawing out strangers in a conversation that dug deeply. He was a forceful and articulate speaker, quick at thinking on his feet. He was persistent. He was also moody, controlling, disorganized, demanding, rather slovenly, and near paranoid—a complex individual. Some of the stories about him are funny if a little disturbing, such as his being stopped by Chicago police because of unpaid parking tickets. Having no identification or money on him and being almost out of gas, he had to be bailed out by an Examiner staffer’s personal funds. Or accidentally shutting himself out of a borrowed apartment in New York City wearing only a towel. There are no such stories about Jane; she was more deliberative and better at logistics as well.

        He energized her; she grounded him. Together they created a conversation about art and about criticism—first between the two of them, then embracing Chicago, and then expanding to a larger scale. Their approach rested on a commitment to fairness, advocacy for artists’ interests, and giving a voice to those outside the power positions. They felt it essential to establish discourse, to talk about art in terms of ideas regarding the context in which art exists—not formalism, literary theories, or the generation of money. Although Derek was to insist that they considered context broadly, the Examiner distinguished itself most notably by addressing politics, both in feature articles and in sharp editorials. They opened the door to new writers, they published established writers of strikingly different postures, and they yielded pages to letters from readers (they claimed to have published all letters received). They invented columns such as “Speakeasy” (which Derek called a “personal editorial”), and the “Art Press Review,” which analyzed other publications.

        Derek dreamed of going national and/or of competing in the world of New York-based art publications. He ran himself ragged trying to accomplish those goals and left the Examiner after collapsing from stress in 1990. He and Jane mostly lived in Cornwall, his base in England, thereafter. But he couldn’t let his art political obsession go and protested National Endowment actions even after he had severed his association with the magazine. And repeatedly, after the Examiner’s demise in 2002, Jane’s passing in 2004, and until his stroke in 2021, he was involved in a succession of efforts to revive the magazine in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and in England, as well as to find an institutional home for it. He was thwarted at every turn mostly due to his uncompromising insistence on having total editorial control.

        In his advanced age he seemed to feel that the Examiner belonged to him and was outraged when educational programs about the Examiner did not include him. He was wrong about that. But the Examiner was all he had. And Jane and Derek created a specific sort of serious but understandable art magazine, admirable for its ambition, its long life despite overwhelming odds, and for the stimulation it offered to Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, and all the other not-New-York cities who were given a boost by attention and intense discussion. That’s no small thing.

 

Janet Koplos was a contributor to the Examiner between 1978 and 1983. She subsequently was an editor and art critic for English-language newspapers in Japan, and then a staff editor at Art in America in New York from 1990 to 2008. She received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for a history of the New Art Examiner, which is nearing completion.