New York's First Super Model... Audrey Marie Munson...

5fish

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2019
Messages
10,620
Reaction score
4,544
Here is a lady Audrey Munson the first super model and I bet @PatYoung did not know it. I bet he did not know that many of the statues in New York city used her as the inspiration and her likeness in creating them. Wiki has a list which is many of the statues in New York of her likeness was used... lived to be 104...


Snip...

Audrey Marie Munson (June 8, 1891 – February 20, 1996) was an American artist's model and film actress, today considered "America's First Supermodel."[1] In her time, she was variously known as "Miss Manhattan", the "Panama–Pacific Girl", the "Exposition Girl" and "American Venus." She was the model or inspiration for more than twelve statues in New York City, and many others elsewhere. Munson was also the first American actress to appear fully nude in film, in Inspiration (1915), the first of her four silent films.

Snip... a man murder his wife for her...

In 1919 Audrey Munson was living with her mother in a boarding house at 164 West 65th Street, Manhattan, owned by Dr. Walter Wilkins. Wilkins fell in love with Munson, and on February 27 murdered his wife, Julia, so he could be available for marriage.[2] Munson and her mother left New York, and the police sought them for questioning. After a nationwide hunt, they were located. They refused to return to New York, but were questioned by agents from the Burns Detective Agency in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The contents of the affidavits they supplied have never been revealed, but Audrey Munson strongly denied she had any romantic relationship with Dr. Wilkins.[1] Wilkins was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to the electric chair. He hanged himself in his prison cell before the sentence could be carried out.

Snip... last years... in an asylum...

On June 8, 1931, her mother petitioned a judge to commit her to a lunatic asylum. The Oswego County judge ordered Munson be admitted into a psychiatric facility for treatment. She remained in the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, where she was treated for depression and schizophrenia, for 65 years, until her death at the age of 104.[2][25]

In the mid-1950s Munson was sufficiently famous to serve as the subject of an anecdote in a memoir that P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton wrote of their years on Broadway, Bring on the Girls! (1953), though that memoir is considered more fiction than fact by Wodehouse's biographer.[26][a]

For decades she had no visitors at the asylum, but she was rediscovered there by a half-niece, Darlene Bradley, in 1984, when Munson was 93.[1] Several years after suffering a stroke,[citation needed] Munson died on February 20, 1996, at the age of 104. [28] She was cremated and her ashes were buried without a gravestone of her own in the Munson family plot in New Haven Cemetery, New Haven, New York. [29] In 2016, 20 years after her death, her family decided to add a simple tombstone for what would have been her 125th birthday.[


It seem in her decade of fame she did leave legacy of statues and a first in film and her youthful likeness is still with us in the many statues that bear her image... Look at the list of statues...

1605234243194.png

1605234288841.png
 

diane

that gal
Joined
Mar 18, 2020
Messages
2,412
Reaction score
3,045
How remarkable! That's why so many statues of that time look familiar. It's like the film musicals - all the women sound the same because they are mouthing to Marni Nixon!
 

5fish

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2019
Messages
10,620
Reaction score
4,544
Even thou she does not have a grave because the spread her ashes on the ground... They gave her a tombstone...


Here is this bio little loose with the her story, bio:

Model, Actress. In her heyday she was called "The American Venus." Born in Rochester, New York, Munson became the model of choice for sculptors and painters in New York City during the 1910s. She is also credited as the first leading lady to do nude scenes in American feature films, including "Inspiration" (1915) and "Purity" (1916). Munson worked with such noted sculptors as Daniel Chester French, Alexander Stirling Calder, and Karl Bitter, and her likeness can be seen at government buildings and in museums throughout the United States. Among the known sculptures she posed for are the figure atop the Capitol dome in Madison, Wisconsin, "Pomona, or Abundance" at the Pulitzer-Plaza Hotel Fountain, "Melvin Brothers Memorial" at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Massachussets, "Brooklyn and Manhattan" at the Brooklyn Museum, "Maidenhood" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Duty and Sacrifice - Firemen's Memorial" and "South Carolina Women's Monument" in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1931 Munson was confined to the Ogdensburg Psychiatric Institution due to mental health issues. She spent the rest of her long life there, dying at the age of 104.

Bio by: José L Bernabé Tronchoni
 

PatYoung

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 14, 2019
Messages
228
Reaction score
415
I pass by the Brooklyn and Manhattan statues at least twice a week and never knew this. The statues used to be at the of the Manhattan Bridge, but Robert Moses had them moved to the front of the Brooklyn Museum. Now an artist has created a replica of the two statues back at the Manhattan Bridge, so she is depicted four times now in Brooklyn.
 
Top