Upon his return to the states, Trunk resumed his study of painting, working under John Sloan and Hayley Lever at the Art Students League in 1919.
His first one-man show at Dudensing Galleries took place in November–December 1928, and garnered many positive reviews: “His is a picture offering beauty, in a deliberate arrangement to achieve that effect.
[4] His work was frequently compared to Charles Demuth, but once Trunk’s skill with color determination and line design emerged, he was recognized as having a “style extremely individual”.
In 1931, Zoltan Hecht’s School for the New Age reproduced one of Trunk’s sailboat images as a hand-hooked rug,[7] an item which attracted the notice of architect and designer Eugene Schoen.
The New York Sun said of the Grant exhibit, “He will paint in the same composition the outside of a house and its interior as well, present within a single frame three seasons at once, and yet in either case contrive to weld the whole into a decorative entity.
It is much like the fragmentary, unrelated, yet overlapping, glimpses that come in dreams, or the way logically disconnected, though vividly realized bits of experience, flash on the drowsing memory when it is not focused intently on any particular thing.
[14][15] His work was supported by Juliana Force, Frederick C. Bartlett, Chester Holmes Aldrich, H.C. Richardson, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, Edward Root, Forbes Watson, and others.
In addition, an October 2009 conference in honor of Trunk at Emmanuel College, “Early American Modernism and Religion,” turned its attention towards the role of faith to the artistic movement.
In December 2011, Cynthia Fowler published, "Herman Trunk's Cubist Crucifix: A Case Study," in Religion and the Arts, a publication of Boston College.
Letters are from Juliana Force, Arthur E. McFarlane, Henry McFee, author B.F. Morrow, and Charles J. Simpson, secretary of the American Veterans Society of Artists, Harry C. Richardson, Gertrude Herdle Moore, Holger Cahill, Audrey F. McMahon, Hugo C.M.