One day shortly after Tristan Meinecke moved to Chicago he saw a mother and her son walking along the shore. “The kid kept veering off toward the lake, and his mother kept saying, ‘Sherwood, walk straight,’” Meinecke says. The incident inspired a short story, “Sherwood Walks Straight,” which Meinecke wrote in 1943 and revised in ’46. A modernist work influenced by Gertrude Stein, the story resists easy interpretation, but Meinecke appears to use the mother’s command as a metaphor for social control. “Americans,” he writes, “are the only people who will gather under a no smoking sign to smoke, and swim under a no swimming sign, and dream under a no dreaming sign, and live under a no living sign, and you will understand also, that this might be because they have more ‘no living’ signs than others have.”
Meinecke remembers his mother as a warmer presence, but says that his parents fought bitterly and frequently. “He berated her a lot. One time my mother was chasing him with a butcher knife. Obviously they didn’t have much of a love life because she named me Tristan–unconsciously I was to be her lover. The name has been good for me in a lot of ways, but when I was young it was terrible; the kids used to tease me about it.”
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In Chicago, Meinecke supported his various artistic en-deavors by decorating department store windows, hustling accounts for an advertising firm, and selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. One day not long after he moved to the city, he walked into a restaurant and saw Angel Casey, a radio actress, sitting with two friends–“the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he says. “I took one look at her and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’”
“Those tales he tells you about women are all true,” vouches Angel.
Urged on by friends, in the early 50s Meinecke studied with composer John Becker, eventually writing a string quartet that has yet to be performed. “Music is a more profound art than painting,” says Meinecke. “Anything that moves logically over a period of time I think is more profound. But you need a hundred men or at least four to play your music. In painting you don’t have that problem.”
One day in the mid-50s Meinecke lost his temper in the studio and threw a hammer at a painting he was working on, punching a hole in the canvas. “I looked at it and thought, ‘Hey, that’s an idea,’” he says. “So I made the hole bigger.” The accident led Meinecke to create what he calls his “split-level paintings”–layered canvases with cut-away sections revealing designs underneath, several of which are included in the exhibit.
