I’m outside the New York Public Library,
and that sculpture there is called Beauty.
Her face might not be familiar to you,
but you’ve probably seen her before.
Audrey Munson was America’s first supermodel.
She was born in 1891, and was scouted as a teenager in New York.
By the early 1910s she was the preferred model for New York City artists.
And in those days, the fashion in architecture was the Beaux-Arts style,
monumental spaces, funded in part by railroad, steel, and banking tycoons,
decorated with statues.
So for a lot of those sculptors,
Audrey Munson was the go-to model.
Audrey stood for hours at a time, locked in position.
Her job was to take an abstract concept and embody it:
to become the concept of Beauty.
Statues of the Beaux-Arts era help explain the building they adorn, so here,
for the New York Public Library, there are two statues:
one is called Truth and the other is called Beauty.
They connect the building to the non-fiction (the truth) and the fiction (the beauty) within.
So Audrey’s face and body are all over New York, and the rest of America.
In monuments, on bridges, on fountains.
At the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco,
somewhere between half and three-quarters of all the sculptures were modelled on her.
Audrey became famous.
It was the early 20th century,
so it seemed natural that she’d move from modelling into the new business of cinema.
She got roles in movies, although those mostly involved her playing a model.
She wasn’t the best actress, though,
and even had a double to do the actual acting sometimes.
Alas, fashions changed, and after World War I the European Beaux-Arts style wasn’t popular
anymore.
The need for a model to represent abstract concepts decorating monumental buildings vanished.
And the modelling world did not look kindly on Audrey as she left her twenties behind.
Like any modern celebrity, there were scandals and high society drama,
but, with fame waning, she attempted suicide
and was eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital where she’d spend much of her life.
She died in 1996 at the age of 104.
But there were reports, during some of her final years,
of her escaping her nursing facility, crossing a four-lane highway,
and spending time in a nearby bar,
telling stories of old New York, of fame,
and about how her likeness remains,
sculpted in stone, across the country.
Today’s video was written with James Earle,
who runs a wonderful art history channel called Amor Sciendi.
Go visit him for more like this!