PHOTO: Brian Zak/The Daily
Munson as a triumphant Columbia atop the Piccirilli brothers' USS Maine Monument in New York.
PHOTO: Bettman/Corbis
Dreamy, pale and softly rounded Audrey Muson in 1922.
PHOTO: Brian Zak/The Daily
Daniel Chester French called Munson ethereal, and modeled his statue "Memory" on her form.
PHOTO: Brian Zak/The Daily
Munson also posed, emerging from the American flag, for French's "Morning Victory."
PHOTO: Brian Zak/The Daily
Munson as "Pomona," the goddess of fruitful abundance, in the Pulitzer Memorial Fountain in New York.
PHOTO: Brian Zak/The Daily
Munson as a triumphant Columbia atop the Piccirilli brothers' USS Maine Monument in New York.
PHOTO: Bettman/Corbis
Dreamy, pale and softly rounded Audrey Muson in 1922.
The word “statuesque” seemed made for Audrey Munson.
Dreamy and pale, slender and softly curved, Audrey played muse to a generation of New York City sculptors at the turn of the 20th century. Her undraped figure still graces Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum and the Municipal Building. Though she tried to translate her beauty to the new medium of film, her career ended suddenly as Modernism — and her 30s — arrived.
Audrey’s discovery was as lucky as Lana Turner’s several decades later. It was 1906; she was shopping in Manhattan with her mother, Katherine, who had just divorced Audrey’s father. Katherine, reportedly taken with a gypsy’s prediction that her daughter was destined for fame, moved the pair to New York City from Rochester. (Katherine chose to ignore the gypsy’s subsequent claim that Audrey would lose it all.)
It was Katherine who noticed a man following her and her daughter on the street that day. She ducked with Audrey into a shop, but the man stopped whenever and wherever they did. Finally, Katherine confronted him. He introduced himself as a photographer and asked if Audrey would pose for him. Katherine relented, and soon, the photographer introduced his young object to sculptors who wanted Audrey to pose naked — “in the altogether,” in the parlance of the time.
Audrey was 15 when her career began. Decades later, she recalled the not-so-gentle nudging of artist Adolph Weinman, best known today for designing coins for the U.S. Mint, to persuade her to undress for him: “Do you think I can tell anything about a woman with her clothes on?” And though she agonized later over her decision to disrobe — “I am just a model, just so many pounds of flesh and blood. He will not be scanning Audrey, the girl — but just a girl, the model” — she consented.
Weinman first saw her naked with her head hanging low, her long hands hiding the delta below her navel, her dark hair uncurling nearly to her waist. Her thick thighs narrowed into thin ankles, her neck was long, her nose Roman. Other artists would be particularly enraptured by the dimples on her back, but Weinman said only, “There, stop.” He asked her to lift her hands to her hair and hold still for 30 minutes. The resulting sculpture, “Descending Night,” made in marble and later bought by the Metropolitan Museum, captured young Audrey — eyes cast down below the veil of her hair, her narrow back sprouting wings — as a humble and slight angel.
Soon after her debut in stone, she became the “queen of the artists’ studios.” Sculptors were commissioned by New York’s new rich and by the booming city itself, building, in accordance with Beaux Arts sensibility, works intended to convey strength and wealth and taste. The sculptors clamored for Audrey, praising her classical proportions and her modern, expressive face.
She was asked to personify, among other notions, memory, peace, abundance, mourning, industry, beauty, and America. Her statues still dot her city, from the Firemen’s Memorial in Riverside Park to the Brooklyn Museum. Daniel Chester French, sculptor of “Memory” and later of Lincoln for the president’s Washington, D.C., memorial, called her ethereal. For fame’s sake, Audrey withstood sucking air through a tube while being cast in plaster, dousings with cold water for a piece called “Waterfall,” and endless hours of painful posing. But she seemed at ease unclothed. And despite spending so many hours naked in the company of men, she was often portrayed in news stories as a simple girl-next-door who lived with her mother, a beguiling naïf who said things like, “Why clothes anyhow?”
On film, she stuck to that philosophy, becoming the first woman to appear nude onscreen. It was the 1910s and Audrey was rounder. She mimicked her life and career by playing models and — in the grand tradition that spans from Ovid’s Galatea to Kim Cattrall’s “Mannequin” — an inanimate object that comes to life in order to love its creator. Yet her onscreen poses were as static as her sittings for sculptures; the full erotic possibility of film stayed unfulfilled, at least for that innocent while.
Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Audrey’s naturalism and ease abandoned her onscreen when she actually had to move around; a lookalike actress was hired to do her acting. Her four films — with neoclassical names like “Inspiration” and “Purity” — didn’t survive their decades. If they had, they would perhaps have the voyeuristic appeal of Marilyn Monroe’s “The Misfits,” of peering through a beautiful surface to search for hints of unfolding tragedy.
Audrey never forgave herself for her failed film career. Or the subsequent scandal that she claimed irreparably damaged her social one: A doctor, infatuated with Audrey and desperate to marry her, murdered his wife. (He hanged himself in prison.) Though she did cling to some fame as a newspaper columnist, writing tips for girls based on her modeling days, she considered herself “cursed.” Artists moved away from depicting the natural human form; Audrey never understood why, and described abstract art as “ugly.” Tabloids ran articles with headlines like “The Awesome Tragedy of Audrey Munson’s Strange Life,” and described her as referencing often that gypsy’s baleful prediction.
Audrey perked up briefly in the early 1920s, claiming she was going to marry a former aviator named James Stevenson from Ann Arbor. But on May 27, 1922, after receiving a telegram — the contents of which are lost to history — Audrey drank down four diluted tablets of bichloride of mercury. She survived the suicide attempt, but she stopped leaving her house, and the New York Times reported that no man fitting Audrey’s description was ever found.
Nine years later, Audrey was forced into an institution for reasons of “mental blight,” as it was vaguely termed. Her father blamed her mother for her supposed madness and for pushing the girl to model; neither of them ever got her out. To her rare visitors, Audrey seemed lucid. And still full of life: On her 100th birthday, she asked hospital staff for a ride on a jet and a bottle of wine.
Five years later, in 1996, Audrey died. Though she was eventually reburied, she was at first put to rest without a tombstone — much less a marble angel.
Swati Pandey is a writer in Los Angeles.
