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I’m outside the New York Public Library,

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and that sculpture there is called Beauty.

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Her face might not be familiar to you,

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but you’ve probably seen her before.

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Audrey Munson was America’s first supermodel.

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She was born in 1891, and was scouted as a
teenager in New York.

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By the early 1910s she was the preferred model
for New York City artists.

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And in those days, the fashion in architecture
was the Beaux-Arts style,

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monumental spaces, funded in part by railroad,
steel, and banking tycoons,

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decorated with statues.

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So for a lot of those sculptors,

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Audrey Munson was the go-to model.

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Audrey stood for hours at a time, locked in
position.

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Her job was to take an abstract concept and
embody it:

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to become the concept of Beauty.

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Statues of the Beaux-Arts era help explain
the building they adorn, so here,

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for the New York Public Library, there are
two statues:

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one is called Truth and the other is called
Beauty.

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They connect the building to the non-fiction (the truth) and the fiction (the beauty) within.

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So Audrey’s face and body are all over New
York, and the rest of America.

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In monuments, on bridges, on fountains.

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At the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco,

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somewhere between half and three-quarters
of all the sculptures were modelled on her.

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Audrey became famous.

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It was the early 20th century,

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so it seemed natural that she’d move from
modelling into the new business of cinema.

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She got roles in movies, although those mostly
involved her playing a model.

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She wasn’t the best actress, though,

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and even had a double to do the actual acting
sometimes.

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Alas, fashions changed, and after World War
I the European Beaux-Arts style wasn’t popular

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anymore.

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The need for a model to represent abstract
concepts decorating monumental buildings vanished.

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And the modelling world did not look kindly
on Audrey as she left her twenties behind.

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Like any modern celebrity, there were scandals
and high society drama,

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but, with fame waning, she attempted suicide

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and was eventually committed to a psychiatric
hospital where she’d spend much of her life.

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She died in 1996 at the age of 104.

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But there were reports, during some of her
final years,

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of her escaping her nursing facility, crossing
a four-lane highway,

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and spending time in a nearby bar,

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telling stories of old New York, of fame,

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and about how her likeness remains,

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sculpted in stone, across the country.

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Today’s video was written with James Earle,

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who runs a wonderful art history channel called
Amor Sciendi.

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Go visit him for more like this!