SCULPTURE

Sunflower Power

Edited by Alex Heard
Contributor: Thomas Vinciguerra

Yesterday, Henry Buhl and a few friends tossed an intimate fund-raising party for 500 at his Southampton home to unveil three sunflower sculptures, including "The Colossal Sunflower," a 3,000-pound, 12¹/₂-foot-tall bronze by the artist Kevin Berlin. Buhl, a SoHo-based community philanthropist who is nuts about sunflowers -- he plants 10,000 annually -- wanted a sunflower big enough to stand under. Berlin envisioned the result as "an offering to the sunflower gods" that would last for centuries. "I told the engineer, if a hurricane blows the house away, the flower should still be standing."

Work began last October and only just wrapped up. Berlin had to cast and sculpture each of the 89 petals separately. "If Henry liked daisies," he says, "it would have been so much easier."

O.K., Henry, the world wants to know: why sunflowers? "I'm impulsive. It's just a cheerful image to surround you." Buhl means it. He sleeps between sunflower-dotted sheets, eats off sunflower plates, keeps his keys on a sunflower keychain, asks his two maids to dress in sunflower aprons, plucks tissues and toilet paper from sunflower-bedecked dispensers, dries himself with sunflower towels and keeps a picture of his ex-wife in a sunflower frame. Note, however: he does not eat sunflower seeds.