Joe Eula Watercolor of a Sunflower

Name: Joe Eula Watercolor of a Sunflower
Brand: Joe Eula
Price: 4500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

From the 1950s to the 80s, Joe Eula cut quite a figure on the New York scene as a graphic, costume, fashion, stage-set, and film-set designer, as well as a stylist, party giver, and, briefly, a model agency macher. In addition, he was an artist. You could say that Eula was the art director extempore of Manhattan. And if you’ve never heard of Eula (or hadn’t before David Pittu played him in the recent Netflix Halston series), it’s because he was famous as an eminence grise, to employ a contradiction in terms. That’s why Andy Warhol called him, in typical Warholian hyperbole, “the most important man in New York.” Eula came from a hardscrabble background in South Norwalk, Connecticut. After serving in World War II, he took classes on the GI Bill at the Art Students League, and formed a partnership with photographer Milton Greene to produce features for Life and Look magazines, and a couple of films, with Greene behind the camera, and Eula painting backdrops and styling. On his own, Eula illustrated Eugenia Sheppard’s famous newspaper fashion column, did illustration work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, designed ballet costumes and sets for Jerome Robbins, an album cover for Miles Davis, and a benefit invitation for Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers, in the day of ‘radical chic." He also threw weekly evening bashes attended by everyone who was anyone – not just Halston, Warhol, Liza, Truman, and Elsa Peretti, but also Martha Graham, Lauren Bacall, Anjelica Houston, Barbra Streisand, Diana Vreeland, Bill Blass, and, when in town, Yves Saint-Laurent. Eula’s hallmark as a draughtsman was a slapdash yet elegant modern simplicity — ”if you could do it with one line why put down fifty?” – and as a personality, an earthy and cocky outrageousness – “these are the worst fucking clothes I’ve ever seen!” he shouted, storming out of a Saint-Laurent show. A surfeit of cocaine accounts, in part, for the outrageousness and slapdashery, but it was talent that put him on map, and Halston’s payroll as a creative director. Eula became indispensable not only for his ability to convey the spirit of a collection in sketches, which had second lives as ads, but in the very realization of those collections through a circular design process, involving drawing, draping, critiquing, and more drawing. Halston crashed and burned in the late 1980s, unlike Eula, who knew when to stop – or when to get away. In the mid 1970s he bought an 18th-century farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. There, he stripped away unsightly accretions, mixed modern furniture with antique finds, converted an outbuilding to a studio, installed a swimming pool (paid for by Halston), and took up flower painting. After decades of sketching top models and socialites in expensive frocks, Eula was now painting the flowers that grew in his garden. If his style was as slapdash as ever, he embraced happenstance as never before. A favorite painterly passage in our watercolor of a sunflower is a patch of raw paper that escaped a surging tide of green, only to lose its virginity to a brown splat. The continuity of his vision, however, is what Eula stressed in a 2002 interview when speaking of the evanescent immediacy “of watercolor, clothes, a moving figure, a beautiful flower that blooms,” and “the goddamned falling petals” at the “most gorgeous moment.” He went on to praise “bright colors — roses and hollyhocks, delphiniums and nasturtiums, dahlias and zinnias, daisies and poppies, and sunflowers the size of your grandmother’s head.” And so, Eula became a modern Redouté, to the incredulity of the Studio 54 set, and found peace in his final years at the end of a country road. This work is reproduced in the book 'Joe Eula' by Cathy Horyn, 2014, page 32.

Creator:

Joe Eula (Artist)

Dimensions:

Height: 37 in (93.98 cm)Width: 29 in (73.66 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)

Style:

Modern (Of the Period)

Materials and Techniques:

Paper,Painted

Place of Origin:

United States

Period:

1980-1989