Audrey Munson was famous for posing naked and being cloaked in scandal.

The Gilded Age model and silent-film star dated America's richest bachelor, was the toast of the 1915 World's Fair and inspired scores of painters and sculptors in the beaux-arts style. This proto-celebrity vanished long ago but her neoclassical features and figure live on in allegorical monuments and paintings across the United States.

In a new biography, "The Curse of Beauty," journalist James Bone investigates the tragic muse who bared it all, attempted suicide and spent almost 65 years in an asylum. Audrey's parents separated when she was 6, and her mother, Kittie, served as chaperone and constant companion during her career.

As a teen, Audrey was discovered by a photographer while window-shopping on Fifth Avenue. Her Aphrodite-like physique stood out among manyaspiring models. "She looked more like the Venus de Milo than any of the other girls," Mr. Bone said, which spurred reporters to call her AmericanVenus.

For a decade, Audrey posed for photographs, illustrations, paintings and murals, as well as monuments, memorials and sculpture. In New York City, she is the unsung equivalent of France's national symbol, Marianne. Audrey towers above the fountain by the Plaza Hotel and is immortalized in the sculptures "Descending Night," by Adolph Alexander Weinman, and "Memory," by Daniel Chester French, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds up a crown in "Civic Fame," an allegorical female figure that stands 25 feet tall on the Manhattan Municipal Building, surpassed in size as a female figure in the city only by the Statue of Liberty.

At the height of her celebrity, the former chorus girl dominated the World's Fair in San Francisco. Then 24, she modeled for roughly three-quarters of the sculptures in the fair's Jewel City exhibit.

To read the complete article, see:
The Rise and Fall of Audrey Munson, the 'American Venus' (www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-audrey-munson-the-american-venus-1459957249)

She was known as "the most perfect model," and in her heyday, one headline proclaimed, "All New York Bows to the Real Miss Manhattan." She earned the name not just because she was the toast of the town in the 1910s, but because her perfectly proportioned face and body inspired numerous works of sculpture that still stand in Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx today.

One contemporary account concluded that Audrey Munson "posed for more public works than anyone" - at least a dozen of which are still on public display. New Yorkers may not know it, but they see Munson everywhere.

Her face and body were the basis for "Civic Fame," the statue that stands atop the Municipal Building at 1 Centre St., as well as thefigure of Columbia adorning the USS Maine National Monument in Columbus Circle and the "Spirit of Commerce" angel at the northern base of theManhattan Bridge.

That's her likeness lounging above the front door of the Frick and coyly tucked in a niche outside the New York Public Library's main branch. She is the face of Pomona, the Roman goddess of abundance, on the Pulitzer Fountain at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, across from the Plaza Hotel.

"She was the first supermodel - and the first model to have a standing in society," says Diane Rozas, co-author of "American Venus: The Extraordinary Life of Audrey Munson, Model and Muse."

To read the complete article, see:
NYC's first supermodel died alone in an insane asylum (http://nypost.com/2016/03/05/nycs-first-supermodel-died-alone-in-an-insane-asylum/)

Roger Burdette adds:

To read the complete article, see:
NYC's first supermodel died alone in an insane asylum (http://nypost.com/2016/03/05/nycs-first-supermodel-died-alone-in-an-insane-asylum/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
WAYNE'S NUMISMATIC DIARY: NOVEMBER 10, 2013 (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n46a19.html)