ANDREA GEYER, a German-born artist, would later describe her first encounter with the famous statue as a moment of intimacy between two living beings. It was the spring of 2004, and Ms. Geyer was starting a residency in a studio on the 33rd floor of the Woolworth Building.

As she wrote in her book “Queen of the Artists’ Studios,” published this year, she was looking out her window over City Hall Park when her eyes met “the gaze of a woman” who was “golden” and “balancing delicately on top of a ball at the tip of the Municipal Building.” Ms. Geyer subsequently discovered that the statue, known as Civic Fame, bore the likeness of an artists’ model named Audrey Munson, a long-forgotten New York celebrity whose face and figure continue to grace the contours of statues all around Manhattan.

It was Ms. Munson’s eyes that stared stoically from the marble forms of the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside Drive, Ms. Munson’s strong body that seemed ready to burst from the granite archway at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. Altogether, Ms. Munson served as the inspiration for more than 15 statues around the city.

Image An Audrey Munson portrait in 1922. Credit... Bettmann/Corbis

From the peaks of fame in the second decade of the 20th century, her fortunes swiftly tumbled. She spent the last 65 years of her life in a mental hospital and, as though by an ironic oversight of some sculptor god, ended up in an unmarked grave without even a tombstone bearing her name. But now, with the help of a New York arts group called Art in General, Ms. Geyer is raising money to buy a monument for Ms. Munson’s grave, in a cemetery in the upstate New York town of New Haven, near Oswego.