“History,” as Vincent DiGirolamo observes in his essay for the Life's Pleasures exhibition catalogue, “has been good to the Ashcan artists” (LP 53). As evidence for this claim DiGirolamo cites the use of Robert Henri, George Bellows and their contemporaries on the book jackets of major history textbooks and surveys, and to this list might be added editions of Stephen Crane, Jack London and Henry Roth as well as PowerPoint slides made to accompany lectures on urban reform, commercial entertainments, labour history, the city novel and so forth. Depicting significant sites, events and processes in the history of American modernity in paintings that bear thematic and formal comparison with realist and naturalist literature, the Ashcan School offer a point of intersection between visual culture and American studies' more familiar historical and literary concerns. DiGirolamo goes on to suggest that these artists hold a particular appeal for social historians because their art “conveys in precise, human terms such abstract historical processes as industrialization, immigration, and urbanization” (LP 55). This is a strong claim for the pedagogic value of these paintings and is central to the way teachers and museums have presented them to students and the public, but raises significant questions about the relationship between art and history, and between art history and other disciplines.

Contemporary interest in the Ashcan School was born out of the turn towards a social history of art during the 1980s and 1990s. With no small debt to T. J. Clark's reading of nineteenth-century French impressionism, Rebecca Zurier, Marianne Doezema and others demonstrated that the Ashcan School were, like Manet and his circle, painters of modern life. (Indeed, differentiating the American artists from their French predecessors remains a real concern: the figure of the flâneur – central to Clark's sense of Parisian modernity – is taken up, revised or rejected by each of the recent books under discussion.) Doezema's George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) uses a wealth of archival material to embed paintings such as Pennsylvania Excavation (1907) and Both Members of This Club (1909) in press and public discourse surrounding the Pennsylvania Railroad Company's ambitious construction project and the racial and legal ambiguities of New York boxing clubs. In the exhibition catalogue Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (New York: W. W. Norton in association with the National Museum of American Art, 1995), Zurier and Robert W. Snyder's essay “Picturing the City” draws on a similar methodology to argue that the “Ashcan artists gave themselves an original challenge: to interpret and give visible form to the dynamic social forces that were shaping and reshaping New York City” (85). This mid-1990s wave of Ashcan scholarship revealed the artists' direct engagement with the popular press and the social history of New York City and cast them as artists responding to the rapid modernization of urban America.

These approaches animate and expand the significance of paintings that can initially appear opaque, anecdotal and insular. While decoding visual puns and allusions is a well-established methodology, the fact that the dishevelled woman clutching a metal pail in John Sloan's Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street (1907) is “rushing the growler” – fetching beer from a saloon in the parlance of the times – is a genuine revelation when first pointed out. This information enhances and enlivens encounters with the painting, and connects it to a history of moral crusades and Progressive Era concerns about the degrading tenement environment. At the same time, contextual details and historical explanations carry the potential to overwhelm or obscure the paintings themselves. Does the connection between Sloan's anecdotal detail and a contemporaneous vernacular expression bring us closer to understanding the painting or the culture in which the slang originated? How might we bridge and theorize the gap between the “precise, human terms” of Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street and “abstract historical processes” such as urban degradation and reform?

Such questions are among the challenges negotiated by two recent exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues – the carefully focussed and richly researched John Sloan's New York and the more avowedly populist Life's Pleasures. While different in many ways, the two catalogues share a wariness of reaching for the narratives and explanations that have gained common currency in analysis of the Ashcan School.

In Life's Pleasures, the rejection of certain historical – or, more specifically, political – readings of the Ashcan School is pursued with some zeal. Curator James W. Tottis's essay “Bars, Cafés, and Parks: The Ashcan's Joie de Vivre” begins with the assertion that perceptions of these artists have been skewed by a tendency to emphasize their engagement with “the lower levels of the socioeconomic scale” (LP 9). Tottis and fellow contributor Valerie Ann Leeds run the risk of overplaying the “universal” nature of this “stereotyped” perception, citing as evidence the Metropolitan Lives catalogue, in which Zurier and Snyder clearly state, “As middle-class observers whose own status placed them between the two extremes, the Ashcan artists portrayed both rich and poor with varying degrees of exoticism and objectification” (ML 104). The wider purpose of Tottis's and Leeds's argument is to refocus attention onto Ashcan works picturing not poverty and labour but the leisure time and pleasurable pursuits of a wide cross-section of society. Viewing these leisure scenes reveals, for example, that George Luks's rapid, vigorous brushstrokes could capture the excitement of New York nightlife as effectively as they caught the bustle and colour of a Hester Street market. By contrast, John Sloan adopts a sparse, schematic idiom in Isadora Duncan (1911), his painting of the modern dance pioneer, which is quite unlike the busy, vibrant style of his more familiar scenes of street and domestic life.

While this refreshing survey emphasizes a different side of the Ashcan School, it does not provide sufficient grounds for a wholesale revision of their significance. Tottis moves from drawing attention to neglected Ashcan leisure scenes to claims for the “generally apolitical nature of most of the Ashcan artists' work.” This claim rests on a narrow conception of what politically engaged painting might involve. It is, after all, in paintings of affluent leisure by Manet and his circle that Clark and others identify the profoundest traces of the forces transforming nineteenth-century Paris. Tottis goes on to argue that these artists have been “misinterpreted” and cast as “as social activists, on the far left side of the political landscape,” when in fact “they were the type of individuals who defined the ‘American Century,’ reveling in camaraderie, entertainments, sports, and general leisure activities” (LP 20). It has long been acknowledged that the Ashcan School were, in various ways, less radical than their press clippings and certain aspects of their careers might suggest. But Sloan was actively engaged in socialist politics, Bellows and Henri taught at the Ferrer School, and many of the Ashcan artists invested considerable time and effort in The Masses magazine. Tottis's opposition between joie de vivre and a presumably dour, joyless “social activism” bears little relation to the heady mix of art, politics and social experimentation that characterized the Greenwich Village milieu of the 1910s and the pages of the pre-First World War Masses. It is a shame that presenting an original and accessible perspective on the Ashcan School is perceived to necessitate taking the politics out of leisure and the joy out of politics.

By contrast, DiGirolamo's catalogue essay cites Roy Rosenzweig and other labour historians, and acknowledges that leisure was a highly politicized issue in early twentieth-century America. Workers and trade unions fought a bitter struggle for the right of working people to leisure time in the evenings and at the weekend and Ashcan paintings showing crowded picnic grounds and Coney Island beaches carry a subtle political charge. Elsewhere in the catalogue, Marianne Doezema reads Henri's and Sloan's bold, powerful paintings of female performers in relation to America's rapidly changing gender politics. It is clear that Sloan's Isadora Duncan and the stylistic innovations it prompted were occasioned by something more than joie de vivre and the glamour of nightlife and celebrity. As Doezema argues, “the image expresses not only Sloan's admiration for the dancer but also his conviction that Duncan epitomized the emancipated, and sexualized, New Woman” (LP 87). Drawing on the alarmed tones of urban reformers, on Floyd Dell's journalistic account of Duncan's performances in the Chicago Review and on images from the popular press, Doezema and DiGirolamo demonstrate the political and historical threads that link images of leisure to other aspects of city life. These essays offer an important corrective to the dehistoricizing, depoliticizing tendencies displayed elsewhere in Life's Pleasures but are, at the same time, a return to Ashcan-business-as-usual, to familiar connections between paintings and historical contexts.

The Delaware Art Museum's exhibition and catalogue John Sloan's New York detaches Sloan from the Ashcan School grouping – and from the grand narrative of early twentieth-century modernization. Heather Campbell Coyle and Joyce K. Schiller's opening essay, “John Sloan's Urban Encounters,” expands and clarifies Guy Pène du Bois's description of Sloan as “the historian of Sixth Avenue, Fourteenth Street, Union Square, Madison Square” (JSNY 65). To this assessment Coyle and Schiller add the caveat that, if this were so, then “he was a social historian, engaged by the lives of ordinary people” (JSNY 74), and then delve into the archives to explore the sense of a beat and a neighbourhood implied by Pène du Bois's list of addresses. Sloan's diaries, letters and sketches are used to tie his work to his location and the route of his daily walks, so that the move from Philadelphia to New York and then the shorter one from Chelsea to Greenwich Village become convincing explanations for formal and thematic turns in his painting. In Chelsea, Sloan's proximity to the Sixth Avenue and West Twenty-third Street commercial districts led to a focus on the “passersby and their activities – walking to the theaters, window-shopping, and, above all else, watching one another” (JSNY 35). The views afforded by his Greenwich studio, and perhaps the bohemian spirit of the Village, prompted more expansive works such as Jefferson Market (1917).

The richly illustrated catalogue surrounds a comprehensive survey of Sloan's New York canvases with maps, preparatory sketches and the artist's written observations, thus recapturing not merely the surface detail of the early twentieth-century city but the lived experience of that place and time. Sloan becomes, in a way, an ideal observer of his lower Manhattan neighbourhoods: sensitive to and immersed in the complexities of this world, he possessed the means and talent to step back and observe without having quite enough of either to become wholly detached. His painting is shown to have a depth of feeling for place comparable to that found in literature covering a similar beat, such as Henry Roth's Call it Sleep (1934). Beyond its obvious appeal to art historians, the catalogue thus has much to offer students and scholars concerned with city writing, urbanism and cultural geography.

Schiller and Coyle locate in Sloan's diaries something of the psycho-geographer's understanding of urban space: “He described Sixth Avenue as having ‘had a Coney Island quality in 1907. It was the Fifth Avenue of the poor and furnished similar facilities at lower rates’” (JSNY 35). Here physical maps become insufficient to the task of capturing the complexities of city life. A subsequent essay, Molly S. Hutton's “Walking in the City at the Turn of the Century,” takes up the analysis of Sloan's “rambles” to identify a “pedestrian aesthetics” in his work. Moving from accounts of the city made by contemporaries – including Jesse Lynch Williams's “The Cross Streets of New York” (1900) and James's The American Scene (1907) – Hutton likens Sloan's activities to more recent walking theory and practice, citing Michel de Certeau's description of individuals claiming the city by walking it and the Situationist and Fluxus emphasis on “aleatory drifting.” Diary entries, such as “walked by a round-about way home, keeping between the Hudson and West Broadway,” support these comparisons by suggesting a wilful randomness, an art to Sloan's everyday actions. For Hutton, “Individual paintings and drawings ultimately appear as mapped records of these various urban excursions, the acts of dérive and flânerie inscribed within them” (JSNY 99). This certainly makes Sloan a stranger, more complex figure than he sometimes appears, less the reporter or historian of material fact than an artist seeking to lose himself in experience.

There is a sense, though, that Hutton and the other contributors get a little lost as they follow Sloan's rambling route through New York's crowded streets. Hutton ultimately rejects the model of the Baudelairean flâneur as privileged witness to modernity, describing instead a more private, introverted figure “whose interest in the city lies in his implicit acknowledgment that the object of his fascination occupied a particularly transitional period in urban history, a period that, for Sloan, could be imaged only through a horizontal, street-level, and mobile perspective” (JSNY 110). In Metropolitan Lives, Zurier and Snyder describe the interpretation and representation of a city undergoing fundamental historical change as the explicit challenge that the Ashcan School artists set themselves. John Sloan's New York insists on the artist's preoccupation with more mundane concerns. While this emphasis accords with the sense of self and of artistic purpose that emerges from the letters and diaries, it also detaches Sloan's local, anecdotal histories from the wider worlds and narratives of which they are a part.

Hutton uses Sloan's Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue (1906) and Alfred Stieglitz's The Flatiron Building (1902–3) to establish the distinction between horizontal and vertical urban visions, but makes no mention of Thomas Bender's The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York: New Press, 2002), which contains a chapter-long elaboration of this comparison. For Bender, Sloan and Stieglitz represent the “two traditions (or faces) of artistic modernism”: one concerned with “human stories” and “warm, soft, and slightly nostalgic,” the other interested in “formal qualities” and “cool, hard-edged, and futuristic” (104–5). Perhaps because it is so carefully grounded in the archival record that surrounds Sloan's paintings, John Sloan's New York rarely moves to align the painter with theoretical, ideological or aesthetic concepts of the kind that facilitate Bender's illuminating comparison. That Bender's account is at times too sweeping and schematic where Coyle, Schiller and Hutton tend towards minutiae and the myopic underscores the difficulty of moving from specific artists and their work to broader social and intellectual histories, or between “precise, human terms” and “abstract historical processes.”

These catalogues are the permanent record of exhibitions that toured American galleries and museums between summer 2007 and spring 2009, and which were designed to engage with and foster public interest in American art. To this end Life's Pleasures evokes a carefree leisure sphere that stands as either a lost age of innocence or a point of origin for contemporary mass entertainments while John Sloan's New York initiates readers and visitors into an intense, highly personal engagement with a much-mythologized time and place. The dehistoricizing or inward turns they sometimes take must be understood within this context and as responses to pressures quite different from those commonly faced by the authors of academic monographs.

Rebecca Zurier's Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School is laudable for many reasons, not least because it takes on both kinds of pressure, presenting a benchmark for Ashcan School scholarship in a manner accessible to broader audiences. This intention is apparent from the opening sentences:

By inviting the reader to join the crowd depicted in Sloan's painting Hairdresser's Window (1907), Zurier makes use of a device rightly favoured by teachers accompanying schoolchildren on gallery visits. But, as the Introduction unfolds, it becomes apparent that there is more at play than a simple desire to “bring the canvas to life”: the challenge here is to look as Sloan and the Sixth Avenue shoppers did, to look with a historicized eye.

Picturing the City begins and ends with Sloan, an artist whose images “invest the daily flow [of the metropolis] with pattern and meaning, but ultimately acknowledge its mystery” (PC 303). Other members of the Ashcan School – perhaps most obviously George Bellows – fair less well in this context. The scope and scale of many of Bellows's paintings take him away from street-level observation and thus away from the book's central concerns. Zurier points out that, while “celebrated for their down-to-earth personae,” Bellows and Luks “came from well-to-do backgrounds that put them at a greater remove from the working class than that of most of their Ashcan colleagues” (PC 214). There is an implicit, and arguably well-justified, critique here, as Bellows's detached perspective is contrasted with Sloan's engagement and participation in the rich, complex communities he pictures. But this approach does mean that while readers are introduced to a fairly representative selection of Sloan's (early) works, Zurier picks selectively from what a contemporary critic described as Bellows's “decidedly cosmopolitan … choice of subjects.” As the Introduction makes clear, discussions of individual painters are “case studies” for particular kinds of “urban visuality” and so, while Picturing the City is by far the most thorough and comprehensive attempt to deal with the Ashcan School en masse, its specific focus limits the extent to which it functions as a general survey.

The opening chapters work through the various generic, conventional, technological and historical factors that shape and condition acts of looking in and at early twentieth-century New York. These include literary sketches, guidebook tours and descriptions of the urban picturesque; popular illustrations, caricatures and cartoons such as Hogan's Alley; photographs, stereoscopes and early moving picture shows; and Progressive Era debates about immigration, assimilation and urban reform. From this survey, Zurier identifies a set of practices that she terms “the turn-of-the-century culture of looking.” This culture is not the product of a single artistic vision, movement or discipline, and is as much a mode of perception as of representation. In her account of Hairdresser's Window, Zurier thus flattens out the distinction between Sloan and the crowd paused outside Madame Malcomb's salon, as painter and passers-by alike are participants in the same “culture of looking.” A tension emerges here between the painter as conduit for a widespread cultural practice and the elevation of the Ashcan School as specialized observers implied by Zurier's account of their highly attuned visual sensibilities, and by the way the design of Picturing the City privileges these figures.

In making the Ashcan School speak not for a broadly defined “social history” but for a more specific history of seeing and picturing in a carefully delineated moment, Picturing the City finds common ground with studies – such as Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) – that turn analysis of visual culture towards the study of the history of vision. Douglas Tallack's recent New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York (Oxford: Berg, 2005 – reviewed in JAS 40, 3) shares Picturing the City's timeframe and location, but, moving from a “working … understanding of visuality” derived from theories elaborated by Crary, Hal Foster and Martin Jay, takes Ashcan painting as one amongst many coordinates in a cross-media exploration of the “material conditions of seeing” that encompasses “a range from abstract modernist to journeyman illustrator” (5). In this company, Zurier can seem a little conservative as she maintains a clear-cut distinction between Ashcan School artists who work in oil on canvas and the cartoonists, illustrators, filmmakers and photographers whose images remain, in the final reckoning, context for the analysis of painting. Given the book's clearly defined remit this observation may seem unwarranted, but it is Zurier's ability to bring so many forms of visual evidence into play that pushes the issue to the fore.

Zurier's emphasis on the “culture of looking” reinvigorates the familiar practice of relating Ashcan School paintings to aspects of social history and other visual media. In Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, the woman rushing the growler is, for Zurier, participating in a form of “street display” while Sloan, his viewers and the pedestrians who turn to stare at the woman engage in “the reading of messages in common urban signs” (PC 292). This approach clarifies the significance of connections that other scholars have struggled to articulate. Katherine E. Manthorne's essay, “John Sloan, Moving Pictures, and Celtic Spirits” (JSNY 150–79), identifies striking similarities in the setting, theme and visual style of D. W. Griffith's Biograph short, Song of the Shirt (1908), and canvases by Sloan such as Three A.M. (1909). Manthorne speculates about whether Sloan met Griffith, and concludes, “their lives and art demonstrate significant intersections” (JSNY 168). By contrast Zurier briefly compares the same works, but moves beyond speculation towards the more clearly defined purpose of identifying a set of codes and interpretative practices shared by the producers and consumers of nonverbal narrative art. Elsewhere, a discussion that begins with the influence of Punch cartoonist Henry Furniss's depictions of London on William Glackens's New York scenes soon expands to encompass the “ethnic fiction” stories Glackens illustrated for popular magazines and the various types and stereotypes performed on the vaudeville stage. Zurier shows Glackens's street scenes, the stories he illustrated and other popular cultural forms responding and contributing to the unique visual language of ethnic identity generated by Manhattan's cosmopolitan Lower East Side.

In each of these readings Zurier extends the significance of Ashcan School paintings beyond the localized scenes in which they were produced, without stretching the analysis to claim that they convey abstractions as broad as “urban modernity.” Picturing the City thus mediates between, on the one hand, the tight focus on individual objects and biographical specificity emphasized in exhibition catalogues such as John Sloan's New York and, on the other, the broader conceptual strokes used by scholars concerned to locate visual representations within the currents of social and intellectual history. This kind of balancing act seems vital to any engagement with these works, whether it is in teaching, in a gallery context or in scholarly research. Setting them apart from their political and historical contexts risks turning Ashcan School paintings into artefacts of local history or glimpses of a lost “lifestyle”; reading these paintings as representations of abstract historical processes risks losing sight of the circumstances in which they were made.