Lawrence and Audrey at the Art of Fine Glass

iA woman posed. A city represented. A text doubled by some other. An allegory. Allos = other. Agoreuei = to speak (publicly), or the impulse to appreciate the transience of things and to rescue them for eternity. I expect again, this fourth dimension walking on the street, I wait up at her and wonder what was rescued from the oblivion of history, a young woman'southward body or Civic Fame? Every bit days laissez passer and I laissez passer her, the body prevails. Traveling through my everyday and through the urban center, I recognize her not merely atop the Municipal Edifice, but other places, on facades, in pediments, on pedestals. I notice a confront, a wave of hair, a curve of a trunk, a gesture of hands, and a position of feet. Recognizable, I recollect, to my surprise, a slight familiarity carved in marble, in stone, in copper or bronze, or painted. A woman stands, a body made permanent to correspond glory, power, memory, peace, purity, virtue… the inexpressible, the space, the highest fullness of being as it sought form in the public infinite of an emerging metropolis. The American Beaux Arts. The revival of Roman and Greek mythology and the height of their virtues as universal. Humble human shapes in front, atop, forth the public architecture of the early 20th century suggested a mutual ground of values to the diversity of a nation trying to observe identity across many. Today these sculptures stand up still, and the bodies they came from safely tucked away, tuckered for college ends, under the embracing gaze of a public's (eternal) melancholy. Like photographs, documents and newspapers, the sculptures prevail over fourth dimension every bit objects, organized and reorganized, classified, qualified, evaluated, recognized, dismissed. As such, they are part of what is used to build our narratives, our genealogies, our histories. Of course there is the purpose marked in the moment of their cosmos and then at that place always has been, over and over once again a new, maybe slightly different claim within every nowadays moment since, with unlike historians, politicians, passersby coming and going. I realize these sculptures still claim their space, here and at present, in our nowadays moment.

iiI am surprised to find a name, a story, Audrey Munson. She posed for Borough Fame in the early on 1910s and many other sculptures, murals, paintings and stained glass windows. A model with a proper name. But not but a model simply the model of her time. A supermodel. I wait again, at present knowingly, not at a sculpture, only a trunk, non at any body, merely at Audrey Munson. I look again at her face fabricated in rock. I am trying to sympathize something of the mind behind this face that posed. What did she do earlier rushing to the studio that solar day, where did she come from? Did she pose it the forenoon, the afternoon, or the evening or an 8 hour day? Did she take the subway? Did she walk, was she scared of the anarchists' bombs exploding effectually the city? Did she pass the suffragists marching, or a picket line of young girls her age, fighting for just wages and healthy work conditions? Had she gotten concord of one of Margaret Sanger'southward educational pamphlets on birth control? Had she stopped at Union Square to hear Emma Goldman give one of her engaging speeches, which had yet over again drawn a mob? Or did she pass the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada artist marching effectually Washington Square Park wearing an inverted coalscuttle for a lid, a vegetable grater every bit a broach, long water ice cream spoons for earrings, and metal tea balls attached to her breasts? Or did she take a plan to have a drinkable afterwards at the bar where Djuna Barnes sometimes did readings, or maybe the Heterodoxy Club to a higher place the Washington Square bookstore, where women met? Had she heard of Willa Cather, read her books? Or had she noticed a handsome European man, with hair combed dorsum, chosen "Marcel" by his colleagues, at the café at the Brevoort Hotel? Or maybe she had to go domicile to run into a deadline for one of her articles, when she was writing for the New York American, a Hearst Paper. Or she may have been worried about her mother, getting older, and therefore she was prepare to blitz off, knowing that her female parent was waiting impatiently for her at habitation. Or peradventure, perchance she was not thinking anything except well-nigh her pose, and the artist, whose eyes were traveling over her body…

3I find a tape in an archive showing that Audrey Munson gave 5 dollars (a day's salary worth) to the Suffragist movement in 1917. I am interested in the histories of women. I am interested in the scripts written for individuals inside the narratives of history. I am interested in the forces that fit certain lives into these scripts, cutting away contradictions and ellipses. I am interested in Audrey Munson as an allegory, not for Peace or Memory, but for the thing that was employed to represent (universal) values and write histories, only was never intended to be visible. I am interested in insisting upon looking at what the builders of these buildings with their thousand-scale statues of high virtues did not want me to see. I am interested in her, every bit a young woman, trying to detect a voice, doing her job, working 10-hour days, seriously, committed, disciplined. I am interested in her who is not named by history, in her goals and ambitions. I am interested in who Munson might have met, with whom she talked, discussed her ideas. I am interest in her views on politics, the city, the arts. I am interested in her judgment of the men who worshiped her, had her picked up in fancy cars, invited her to parties. I am interested in who might take been her lover. There are rumors of a man chosen Herman Oelrich, from a rich Long Island family, who supposedly married her in 1916. I read this in her mother's messages only I cannot find a record of the marriage in the city history. Peradventure Audrey was non interested in matrimony at all and just kept upwards the facade of such a search for a husband to sooth public opinion. Maybe she was attracted to women, or perhaps she wanted to stay independent, making choices on her own terms. I am interested in looking at her convictions, of taking her seriously in her endeavor, ignoring the drama of the story written around her in paper manufactures and coffee table books. The craziness, the despair. But I am not trying to dismiss the struggles or the suffering that she surely endured, simply looking closely, to me information technology seems obvious that her life was not driven through or by them. Why chose to look just at them and not at her bold moves, her passion for fine art, her determination, her clear decisions, her hard piece of work? I do not want to write or rewrite her story, but I would like to insist to leave information technology open, information technology to be rewritten, constantly imagined, recontextualized over and once again, with any glimpse we grab of a sculpture or of a painting that nosotros pass.

4Audrey Munson was probably a girl like many others, with dreams and desires. Born in 1891 in Rochester, New York. Her parents divorce under unknown circumstances in 1899. In 1909, Audrey and her female parent motion to New York. We don't know why but probably considering the urban center was the only place for a divorced Catholic woman to alive and a place for her to observe work. Young Audrey wanted to exist a dancer and to study music, I read and once in the city her desire to be seen is brought together with the coincidence of "being discovered." Upon a photographer's invitation Audrey, still a teenager, has the courage to footstep first in front of a camera, and so in front of an artist, then in the nude. I often wonder why Katherine Munson, would have given her consent. I have to suspect that it was the potential income that the women nearly likely needed. Later I observe other stories of Munson'south commencement introduction into the studios: once she is alone, once with her mother, once in love with the photographer. But however the by unfolded, in one case Audrey entered this world, she quickly became a wanted model and function of a scene of influential sculptors, artists and their fiscal backers. In the city's directory of 1909, Audrey lists herself every bit an extra. Afterwards 1915 she will call herself, in this same directory, an artist. Audrey Munson too wrote articles for newspapers. Every bit an author she describes the artists' studios as a marketplace of vanity, speaks near the structure of beauty, well-nigh exploitation and the power of men effectually her. She advocates to leave corsets behind, and wear low heels. She warns of the lure that girls are exposed to when they are cute. And she likewise advocates for her profession, the artist's model, sometimes with a slight force of despair, defending herself and her colleagues, their hard labor and more than then one time elaborating on their share in the creative act while posing. She points to the fact, that models are never credited simply rather despised for their piece of work; never considered creative but ever indecent. She also writes virtually the artist. High on her stand in the midst of the studio, she confidently returns his gaze. Reading along, I recognize an former struggle in the creative process: the Muse and the Artist. The woman and the man. The informant and the maker. An issue that is relevant nevertheless and again today. I also recognize Munson's disquisitional, self-reflective mind. An object turned subject field, and a vocalism speaking upwardly over the racket of signification.

5With the 1920s times changed. The need for Audrey every bit a model started to fade. Newspaper manufactures appear challenge that she got cursed with misfortune. Audrey tells stories that she felt led to her demise: one of them the Wilkins murder case. In 1919, Dr. Walter Keene Wilkins, her landlord, brutally killed his wife, and when arrested told the police force that he did it only to exist able to marry Audrey Munson. Audrey, in Canada on business at the time, was not reachable which let speculations inflate disproportionately and implicated her proper noun deeply with the instance. At the same time Audrey was aging, now in her early thirties, her body was not that of a young girl anymore. With this sudden lack of fame, the invitations to social engagements and the adoration past the high society of New York ceded. She had served their desire for the cute, the daring, the scandalous, in the moment of its fashion. Money ran curt for the Munson women shortly after, and little or no savings had been arranged from the successful years. Audrey says in an interview that she never thought information technology possible for her career to end and then all of a sudden. Her pay equally a model never much exceeded 35 dollars a calendar week. Information technology had been merely the gifts and invitations of the artist and the society that surrounded them that had afforded her and her female parent a lifestyle much beyond those means. The women, non meeting the twenty-four hour period's needs, moved dorsum north, to Mexico, New York. Simply Audrey'south fame had even reached this little boondocks tucked in-between the rolling hills of mostly agricultural landscapes. People knew what she did — what she had washed for a living. Audrey was seen in unusual outfits, ofttimes wearing colorful scarves wrapped similar a turban around her head. A adult female I meet tells me that she remembers as a little girl, her mother would tempest to the sunparlor and shut the defunction when Audrey "who had undressed for money" passed past. People did not treat her fame, her life in the metropolis, her travel, her stories. Mexico after all was a small town, a tight community of proper people, in which an independent, creative woman like Audrey had no ground on which to be accepted. She was considered improper, and soon thereafter, plain crazy: the safe place societies reserve for those who are different and in their divergence challenge the established values and norms. What Munson had described in her articles became her fate. Her work had made her an indecent person, desirable in marble and on screen but not in flesh and blood.

6On May 27, 1922, Audrey tries to take her life by swallowing poison. Papers report that this incident occurs after Audrey received a telegraph that called her announced wedding off, but her mother describes her girl's desperate human action equally a response to their financial struggles. Probably a piddling of both, plus the dire reality of her life in forepart of her, as rejected, living under poor conditions in the countryside in complete isolation, after a fulfilled life of stardom, public attention and celebration. Audrey survives the poisonous substance and recovers from her suicide attempt physically but probably never quite mentally. After a few more articles, things quiet down around her. Also in search of yet some other scandal, the public eye loses interest in her, now not glamorous but suffering. There is no fame in the struggles with poverty, and the struggles of the mind especially non if the mind and poverty in question belongs to a woman. I find a picture in a newspaper, Audrey has six big dogs continuing around her, that keep her and her female parent company. On my inquiry trip to Mexico I am fortunate to encounter Ralph Schmidt, a senior Mexico resident. He remembers when he was about 8 years old, in one case in while he would see Audrey passing by the farm he lived on. She was roller-skating, he tells me. His retention, today still vivid, describes Audrey pushing a lawnmower in front of her to keep balance on her skates on the dirt road. "She for sure was a cute women," he tells me with a smile. Audrey fabricated one more attempt to earn respectable coin from her expertise. She founded The Audrey Munson Producing Corporation. It is in these papers that I find her very own signature, her handwriting. I experience I am very close. The Corporation never achieves any success. I read somewhere that she most likely driveling drugs to soothe her depression. On June 8, 1931, on her fortieth birthday, Audrey is admitted by her female parent and with the aid of a local judge to the Psychiatric Center at the State Infirmary in Ogdensburg, New York. Probably her mother admitted her with what would be named today a severe low, or maybe because of drug addiction. Or was information technology because her fashion of thinking, her voice, her determination, that could not find anyone to listen, had to exist designated in a woman of twoscore years of age, equally mad?

7In the 1930s, the Ogdensburg State Hospital was a repository not only for people who were mentally sick but as well was used by the surrounding communities to place relatives that could for all kind of reasons not be cared for by their families. The hospital is located north of the town of Ogdensburg on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. Prepare equally a self-sufficient community, it had its own power plant, a subcontract, a trivial store, a trolley station, a ferry boat for weekend rides, a summer camp, a police force force, a fire station, a postal service office, a theater, a baseball team, a bowling alley, and a beauty parlor. There were weekly dances and theatrical plays. The buildings were designed according to the Kirkbride Plan, with high ceilings, allowing maximum space and light for all patients. There were verandas surrounding most buildings for patients to enjoy the view of the river and the fresh air. The wards were furnished in a friendly manner with rocking chairs, carpets, sofas, and pictures decorating the walls. Food was cooked from the hospital farm's own produce and meat. The buildings were surrounded by lakes and beautiful flowerbeds. It is unclear what treatment Audrey receives. Her mother cannot visit her often, due to the toll of the railroad train ride. The hospital is 150 miles north. By the 1950s, her parents are both deceased and Audrey does non receive visitors anymore. She is on her own, making her own life inside the customs of the State Hospital. At that place is no indication that Audrey was on whatsoever medication. I am told that she was spending her time in the library and caring for the many cats that lived on the grounds. I am also told that she took great care of her appearance, making all kind of remedies for her skin including ingredients from milk, to yogurt, to urine. Audrey stays at the hospital, despite the waves of patient downsizing and the tremendous changes that occurred in Mental Hygiene since the 1950s. "She was a very pocket-size fine lady", I am told.

8In the 1980s, the hospital decides to identify Audrey into a nursing home, 30 miles northward of Ogdensburg in Massonia. Audrey, in her nineties now, has her ain room, which she keeps neatly organized. I am told she had a doll that she cared for a great bargain. But once in a while she left the home to go on a little excursion on her own. She would cross the iv-lane highway in front of the nursing home to reach the fiddling strip mall and visit the local bar. At the bar, she would have a couple of drinks and I imagine conversations filled with her breathtaking memories. The caretakers at the nursing dwelling house had to go repeatedly to collect her. They would carry her back against her will, because she had been enjoying herself at the bar and did not want to leave. Afterward a while this behavior was non considered tolerable, an petite former lady in her nineties, crossing a highway, having some drinks in a bar… They sent her back to the State Infirmary in Ogdensburg. I meet a male nurse, now retired, who tells me that he had a special connection with Audrey. He would see her walking the long halls of the infirmary, always a hit posture, always wishing him a farewell. He recounts that some fourth dimension after her 100th altogether, when her health had declined — she had broken her hip and was forced to stay in bed at this signal — he visited her in her room. Another nurse present suggested that Audrey sing her favorite nurse a Valentine vocal. Audrey, with no teeth, and barely any hearing left, sang him a fine piddling melody. He nonetheless smiles when he recounts it to me. In 1996, simply curt of her 105th birthday, Audrey dies at the hospital. The office of the hospital that where Audrey generally lived is at present closed off. The one-time buildings that had been domicile for a customs of iii,000 in its heydays stays boarded up, unheated and rotting away, on what is now considered valuable real estate. The patients and the flowerbeds are gone, the lakes are filled up. It all feels like a corking loss. I walk forth the grown-over verandas and wonder if Audrey would take been function of the official history books, if she had married and lived a family life. What would accept changed if she had not been designated a mad person? Or what would have happened if one of the sculptors she worked with, i of those who owed some of his masterpieces to the inspirations she gave him, what if one of these men would accept paid her a small-scale assart, to stay and live in the city with people who heard her, understood her style of thinking?

ixReturning from my research trip, I find myself back on the street carrying folders full of copies of documents and images. Glancing up at her again, trying to run into her gaze. I see Audrey Munson, a statue, a life lived. Out in the street or in the Metropolitan museum'due south vitrine, she stands a statue, an apologue, an unnamed women, amidst the named busts of white men. I don't see the bronze or the stone anymore, I don't meet a sculpture by an creative person, only I see a body, hear a voice. I can feel her agency, now and then, continuing solid in her delicate nudity. I know that these sculptures link together many histories, relations and anecdotes, my piece of work and the work of those who have been working with me on this project accept become part and intractably linked to this maelstrom of Audrey Munson. And with this essay, I extend that link, that inevitable connectedness and insight to yous as a reader. Considering why would you care to read a story like this if not to retell? The sculptures seen this way are documents of emotions, of desires, of ability, of money, of exploitation, of morality, of alter, of struggle. The sculptures become a code of reference that inevitably binds the public to the individual and back to the political. They tell the story of one young adult female and plow it into the story of many, a text, upon a text, upon a text, upon a text, folding the past into the nowadays and into the time to come. Audrey Munson'due south gaze returned in her writing, in her sculptures and in the story of her life, represents for me a line of demarcation that inserts into the everyday, non some other truth, simply meaning. Pregnant that does non add up to a coherent story, a biography that tin can exist written and shelved, but instead in its present fragmentation, and every bit a screen for all our electric current and by desires, it unfolds forth the lines of a circuitous struggle of young women to have a vocalisation and to exist heard, to be respected, to be acknowledged, that Audrey Munson shared and shares notwithstanding today with many others. For me and you, passing by, now and once more now, ever only in the nowadays moment, these serenity sculptures tin can exist a gentle reminder of this presence of endless moments, of many radical condensations of personal and political struggles woven into the fabric of New York City.

Notes

• [*]

  Pages 135 à 154 : Andrea Geyer, Queen of the Artists' Studios, the Story of Audrey Munson (excerpt), 2007. Intimate secrets of studio life revealed by the most perfect, nigh versatile, well-nigh famous of American models, whose face and figure have inspired thousands of modern masterpieces of sculpture and painting.

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Source: https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2007-4-page-133.htm

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