The Star Girl

I was downtown today having lunch with Hacker Boy and we stumbled across this beautiful, sexy statue from 1945 called The Star Girl. She’s in a gorgeous marble atrium at 1 Sansome Street, open to the public. She really captures a lot for me right now.

Here’s my photo set of The Star Girl, some with my Lumix and some instantly uploaded with my Helio Ocean. HB also uploaded a couple direct from the atrium with his Nokia N95 if you want to compare.

I’ll add this quote, snagged from a friend’s email sig today:

“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”
-Oscar Wilde

Update: Flickr friend DairDair clued me in to the model for The Star Girl, a.k.a. Calder‘s The Star Maiden: the stunning Audrey Munson. And guess what? It’s not updated frequently, but there’s a blog dedicated to this New York beauty, including her headstone — and the fact that she died at age 105 (according to her tombstone)!

She lives forever, actually. She was known as the “American Venus” — nude model extraordinaire — and at one point had over 30 pieces of art based on her in the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m surprised to see how well the Oscar Wilde quote fit this post, after reading the NYT quote: “‘This young women ought to be ashamed of herself,’ was the usual observation of early 20th-century moralists about Audrey Munson (…)”