(Monica spent some surreptitious hours in the public library tracking down the elusive artist “Sheila Trask.” Browsing through back issues of Art News, Art in America, American Artist. Turning the pages of these glossy magazines, examining the illustrations and advertisements, Monica felt her old prejudices return in a flood of mild revulsion. Perhaps it was not the art that offended her so much as the seriousness with which it was presented, and the value—clearly monetary—assigned it. Coils of rope on a gallery floor; ungainly white plaster figures of “humanoid” design; black stripes on boards; smashed crockery; American flags dipped in paint; a massive coil of chicken wire; “Action Paintings”; “assemblage sculpture”; “Pop Art.” She stared at photographs of a middle-aged male artist who had systematically burnt himself with cigarettes and made odd little nicks in his skin with a knife—and very subdued and proud the man appeared, as the herald of a “new and revolutionary” approach to art. There was the media-celebrated artist who had “packaged” several Miami islands in fluorescent-pink plastic, and another artist, scarcely less celebrated, who had publicized the idea—simply the idea—of packaging the entire globe in a similar material. . . . In this context it did not surprise Monica to learn that Sheila Trask with her nonrepresentational but highly detailed canvases was considered a “conservative,” even a “traditionalist.” Her work was described as Abstract Expressionism of a sort, in its “lyric” phase; yet it was related too to Minimalism; even to Primary Structuralism—whatever that meant: Monica gathered that it had something to do with sculpture. Trask’s work was “ascetic” . . . and “hedonistic” . . . and “cerebral” . . . and “impulsive.” It quite clearly derived from Cubism; yet there was an element of Action Painting in it, and overtones of German Expressionism. A predecessor was Hans Hofmann—unless it was de Kooning—and of course the influence of Morton Flaxman was never to be underestimated. One lengthy article in American Artist included a photograph of Trask’s studio in which Sheila Trask—somber, down-looking, very young and very thin—stood with her hands in her coverall pockets between two immense paintings propped against a wall; and it seemed to Monica that Sheila Trask herself was far more interesting than her work. Those large canvases, those queer unsettling strands and loops and stains of color, those empty areas—what was one to make of them? what words would do?)