CITY Critics’ Picks LOCAL COLOR
747 PARK AVENUE, ROCHESTER, NY 585.244.2585 129 S. MAIN STREET, CANANDAIGUA, NY 585.396.2585 154 THE COMMONS, ITHACA, NY 607.273.2585
Best Local Scandal You’ve Never Heard About Audrey Munson
In 1920, lyricist Ballard MacDonald wrote a song for Fanny Brice about “Rosie, the queen of the models” who posed “with or without her clothes.” He could have been remembering Audrey Munson, the first woman to appear completely nude on film. Born in Rochester in 1891, Munson moved to New York where a photographer spotted her at the age of 15. Sculptors soon began to use her as their model for architectural statuary, very popular at the time. Artists and the public liked portrayals of naked women, so long as they had allegorical names. Munson starred in four silent movies, but only a single print — for “Purity” — has survived. By the end of the decade, a married suitor had murdered his wife to free himself to marry her, but the negative publicity ended her career. In 1920, she and her mother moved back to Mexico, NY, east of Oswego. When she attempted suicide, a judge ordered her committed to a psychiatric facility where she remained for 65 years. She died in 1996 at the age of 104. Munson posed for some of the most important sculptors of her time, including Daniel Chester French, best known for the seated Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial; Alexander Stirling Calder, whose George Washington as President adorns the Washington Square Arch in Lower Manhattan; and Robert Ingersoll Aiken, best known for the West Pediment of the Supreme Court Building. Although some Munson statues have been destroyed, others still stand in all their unadorned glory in the parks and above the streets of New York — the Manhattan Municipal Building, the U.S.S. Maine memorial in Central Park, and the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza. Though she came to an unhappy end, visitors to Manhattan can still see Audrey Munson in all her allegorical — and physical — extravagance. (ML)
34 City BEST OF ROCHESTER 2012