The Young Woman Who Personified Everything

Back when it was a print zine and not an (all too irregular) blog, John Yohalem’s Enchanté had some articles on “gods of the city”—architectural and sculptural representations of the Olympian deities and other Neoclassical figures.

Somewhere in there, perhaps, were sculptures based on a young woman named 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 Munson
Audrey Munson

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?”

The rest of her life was not so good.

 

One thought on “The Young Woman Who Personified Everything

  1. Yes, well, she may have been dealing with psychological/psychiatric condition(s), and who knows what personal history, but it’s still not healthy to languish in the dark flip side of extreme idealization…to accept the static on either side of that coin actually. Stagnation is not so much full of purpose and meaning but offers superficial depth begging to get really bent out of shape just around the corner. Powerfully depicted ideals need to be more than lofty and disjointed (“memory, peace, abundance, mourning, industry, beauty, and America”)…they need ongoing, informed, contemporary open dialog that gives them meaning in today’s world.

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