Audrey Munson

Audrey Marie Munson (June 8, 1891 – February 20, 1996) was an American artist's model and film actress, considered to be "America's first supermodel.

[7] In 1909, mother and daughter moved to Washington Heights in New York City, where the 17-year-old Audrey sought a career as an actress and chorus girl.

[9] While window-shopping on Fifth Avenue with her mother she was spotted by photographer Felix Benedict Herzog, who asked her to pose for him at his studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building on Broadway and 65th Street.

[10] From this point, Munson would pose for a few well-known visual artists, including painter Francis Coates Jones, illustrators Harrison Fisher, Archie Gunn, and Charles Dana Gibson,[11] and photographers Herzog and Arnold Genthe,[1]: 29, 43  but she was predominately a sculptors' model.

Munson's first acknowledged credit is Konti's marble statuary called Three Graces, unveiled in the new Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Astor in Times Square in September 1909.

Soon after that and for the next decade, Munson became the model of choice for the first tier of American sculptors, posing for a long list of freestanding statuary, monuments, and allegorical architectural sculpture on state capitols and other major public buildings.

By 1915, she was so well- established that she became Alexander Stirling Calder's model of choice when he became Director of Sculpture for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco that year.

Her figure was "ninety times repeated against the sky" on one building alone, atop the colonnades of the Court of the Universe, roughly modeled on St. Peter's Square in the Vatican.

In the first, Inspiration (1915), made by the Thanhouser Film Corporation in New Rochelle, New York and directed by George Foster Platt, she appeared fully nude in a story of a sculptor's model.

[18][19] Munson returned to the East Coast by train via Syracuse in December 1916, having been involved with high society in New York and Newport, Rhode Island.

There are accounts in which her mother insists she married the son of a "Comstock Lode" silver heir, Hermann Oelrichs Jr., then the richest bachelor in America.

On January 27, 1919, she wrote a rambling letter to the U.S. State Department denouncing Oelrichs as part of a pro-German network that had driven her out of the movie business.

By 1920, Munson could not find work anywhere and was reported as living in Syracuse, New York, supported by her mother, who sold kitchen utensils door-to-door.

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?

"In February that year, agent-producer Allen Rock took out advertisements showing a $27,500 check he said he had paid Munson to star in a fourth film titled Heedless Moths, directed by Robert Z. Leonard from his own screenplay based on these writings.

[8] She remained in the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, New York, where she was treated for depression and schizophrenia for 65 years, until she died at the age of 104.

[120] In 2010, film director Roberto Serrini made a documentary[121] about Munson which was featured in several news outlets including the New York Post.

His wife told him to expect a woman who would redo the couch, so when Audrey Munson knocked and asked if there was any work for her, Wodehouse said yes and "How much would it be altogether?"

Adolph Alexander Weinman 's Descending Night , featured on the cover of Sunset magazine (October 1915) [ 4 ]
Audrey Munson in Purity , Liberty Theatre
Munson posed for all these Panama-Pacific International Exhibition sculptures.
Thumbnail sketches of Munson in the poses of famous works of art, 1916 newspaper ad for Purity . Munson was the model for Karl Bitter's Pomona (3rd from left) and Adolph Alexander Weinman's Descending Night (center). [ 52 ]
Audrey Munson and Thomas A. Curran in Inspiration (1915), her film debut