Audrey Munson, 1891-1996

Audrey Marie Munson started her career as a Broadway chorus girl, after moving with her divorced mother to New York City. Her life took a turn at the age of 17, while window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, the teenager was spotted by a photographer who offered her to pose for him. He introduced Audrey to his artists friends, and she soon became a wanted model, often in the nude, for many famous male artists and sculptors.

Audrey Munson has posed for iconic sculptures on government buildings and public monuments, many of the statues still in place in the streets of New York city – winning her the title “Miss Manhattan.” Other titles included “The American Venus,” “America’s First Supermodel,” “The Queen of the Artists’ Studios,” and “Panama–Pacific Girl” for modeling for a majority of the carvings at the International Exposition in San Francisco.
 

Munson took pride in her work, claiming nudity as an expression of female freedom, writing: “Clothes ruined us. They do harm to our bodies and worse to our soul.” She moved to California and shifted her career towards the film industry. She starred in four silent films and is considered the first actress to appear fully nude in an American feature film. She played a sculptor’s model in her first film, “Inspiration” (1915), which is nowhere to be found today. Audrey Munson was also a writer, publishing a series of 20 short stories about her life in the Sunday Magazine.

She and her mother became associated with a famous murder case – when their landlord killed his wife, supposedly because he was in love with Audrey. Even though she had no part in the crime, it has affected her reputation negatively. At 40, she was admitted by her mother to a psychiatric institution for depression and schizophrenia. She lived there for the remaining 60 years of her life, until her death at the age of 104. Her gravestone, which was added 20 years after her death, features a small sculpture of an angel figure, dressed.

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