She is everywhere and nowhere. Audrey Munson’s bronze shoulders slope forward atop the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel as the Roman goddess Pomona, her soft flesh rippling at her hips. She wears a flaming gown of gold while adorning the Manhattan Municipal Building — the second-largest statue of a woman in New York City, next to the Statue of Liberty.
She’s an angel in the skyline, and she’s lounging on the Upper West Side, and she’s at the Brooklyn Museum, and she’s in Cleveland, and in Wisconsin, a statuette on a family mantel, and shattered into abstraction in a Picabia painting on a wall of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A magnificent virtual city was erected in San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 — made by plastering temporary facades on existing buildings — complete with some 1,500 sculptures, and while it’s tough to estimate precisely how many Audreys were among them, the best guess is somewhere in the hundreds. At the Court of the Universe, with a palatial colonnade that opened onto the present-day Marina District, more than 100 Audreys spanned the perimeter. Nearby, a small courtyard featured grand anthropomorphic depictions of the Four Seasons—all presumed to be Audreys. When Audrey Munson looked upon "Spring," she wistfully observed that the statue was "far lovelier, I fear, than I can ever be."
There are two eras in history in which people wrote about Audrey Munson. One occurred during the height of her fame, from about 1909 to 1920. In 1921, she swan-dived out of public favor, and while visible for the next decade or so, she spent the rest of the 20th century out of view. She died in 1996, at a mental institution in upstate New York, at the age of 104. In 2016, the podcast 99% Invisible devoted an episode to her career, which restoked public interest. The episode was called "Miss Manhattan," after the nickname bequeathed to Munson by the New York Sun in honor of her appearing as the Spirit of Commerce in a sculpture installed at the Manhattan Bridge. "It seems funny to be called Miss Manhattan," she told the newspaper at the time. "Nevertheless, I suppose I must get used to it."
Audrey is everywhere, and Munson is nowhere. The statues that she posed for are some kind of version of her, projected through the imagination of the (mostly male) artists who would freely take liberties with her dimensions or cut and paste them entirely onto other sculptures. She spent her life obsessed with appealing to them. As a teen in New York City, Munson found work as a chorus girl, a relatively new and groundbreaking entertainment phenomenon imported from Europe: Beautiful women dancing in unison. According to Florenz Ziegfeld, this was a movement meant to "glorify the American girl." Marriage proposals from millionaires would rain down like roses at curtain call, or so the legend went, vaulting the dancers into lives of glamour and comfort.
Munson was a capable dancer, but more importantly, she was breathtaking to look at. One day, while she was window-shopping with her mother on Fifth Avenue, photographer Felix Benedict Herzog asked Munson if she’d indulge him with a portrait session. Herzog primarily identified as an inventor and electrician, a career that in 2019 would translate roughly to "founder of a Bitcoin startup." Munson and her mother showed up at his studio, where he photographed her scantily draped in fabric. Click! Munson was now a professional model.
A large part of Munson’s success came from her relentless work ethic, typified by her reputation for wandering between studios and asking for work. Shortly after her shoot with Herzog, Munson was asked to pose nude for a version of the languid Three Graces, ordered for display in the ballroom of the Hotel Astor. Munson’s mother balked, but the sculptor, Isidore Konti, assuaged them both: "To us it makes no difference if our model is draped or clothed in furs. We only see the work we are doing." Okay! Munson was now a professional nude model. (She played all three Graces.)
The other part of Munson’s popularity was that she came extremely cheap, charging about 50 cents an hour — an amount that would equate to about $15 today — times 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. The job required abject stillness while emulating various poses of the Grecian imagination, the quality of being soft while contracting every muscle in your body. "It is really a strain," Munson told the Sun. "If a girl’s nerves are not in excellent condition and her muscles [are not] strong and ready for such a test, she makes a wobbly sort of model, and the artist cannot work."
It also helps to be monumentally beautiful. Munson drew frequent comparisons to the Venus de Milo, exposed but demure, spine twisted and body soft like vanilla ice cream. By her own account, she posed for a replica of the Venus for Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. (She wanted one with arms.) And If Munson was Venus, the beaux arts movement was the sea from which she was born — at the turn of the century, the movement returned to classical themes in art and architecture, like those of ancient Greece and Rome. America, flush with cash, sought to make New York City a global capital on par with the great cities of Europe, and so began pouring dollars into public monuments in an attempt to pack centuries of history into a handful of decades.
Her coming of age in New York City was perfectly timed to an artistic movement in which she happened to resemble the female ideal, at a time when perfection was the focus of a "science" worth studying. "Eugenics was included in the displays at the World’s Fair," says Heidi Applegate, an independent art historian who lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "There was this interest in representing the ideal type of man and woman. Munson became the ideal for the artists who portrayed her. They glossed over her individual features to turn her into a classical ideal that didn’t exist in reality." Munson’s obsession with her own mathematical perfection led to an interest in eugenics — a long since discredited field of pseudoscience concerned with the pursuit of genetic perfection — and during her slide into obscurity, she held a pageant seeking "the Most Perfect Man," specifying that he must be of English or Danish origin.
At the height of her celebrity, Munson made a career choice that unknowingly set a standard for more than a century of models to come: She pivoted to acting. First on the stage, but soon the burgeoning film industry was interested in her, and she was interested in anything.
In 1916, in a dazzling example of turn-of-the-century Christian solidarity, the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic congregations of New Rochelle, New York, came together to rally against a local screening of Inspiration, on the basis that the film was morally corrupt and unsuitable for public consumption. The film depicts, for the first time in American history, female nudity without pornographic intent — Munson plays a model and muse to a sculptor who falls in love with her but not until after he’s covered her naked body in plaster. A group of high school students who had gathered for the canceled screening returned home, crestfallen.
The same year, Munson also decamped for California, where she became one of the earliest American wellness influencers. "Health is certainly the first wealth, and usually the means of every other wealth," she wrote in one of her semifrequent newspaper columns. "Most healthy people, if not actually beautiful, are certainly good to see."
Her career barely survived the decade. Film opportunities would materialize and vaporize instantly, like water droplets on a hot iron — the New York Herald described the closing of her film Purity as due to a "sad, but entirely natural lack of interest." An increasingly frustrated Munson wrote a bizarre letter to the United States government accusing a slew of individuals, including movie and stage producers, of pro-German sympathy in the wake of World War I. Munson believed that, as a woman of English descent, they were conspiring to end her career. A gripping murder-suicide involving a doctor who was obsessed with Munson soured public opinion, and eventually her work dried up entirely — she and her mother moved to upstate New York, where both would live for the rest of their lives.
Not a decade after becoming Miss Manhattan, Munson attempted suicide by drinking poison, shortly after receiving a telegram from her "Most Perfect Man" calling off their impending marriage. She and her mother lived meagerly in their small town, where Munson was regarded as an eccentric, often serving as the scapegoat for unexplained town mischief. At age 40, Munson’s mother had her committed to an asylum. Decades later, journalist James Bone traveled to Oswego County, New York, where, with cooperation from some of Munson’s relatives, he was able to unseal the commitment documents. Her mother had described "depression, delusions, hallucinations," and despite normal physical evaluations from doctors, the judge approved the motion. The petition was, Bone noted, filed on her birthday. She lived there until she died, the horizons of her world narrowing to a compound of buildings somewhere near the Canadian border.
"What becomes of the artists’ models?" Munson asked in a column published in 1921. "I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?"
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