Villa Borghese represents the peak of de Kooning’s success, but de Kooning was just too cool to enjoy it.

An immigrant from the Netherlands, Willem de Kooning came to US as a young man, tucked away as a stowaway on a ship. He was classically trained in Rotterdam and primed to be a good, by-the-rules type commercial artist or designer up until Gorky came into his life and inspired confusion, pain, and above all; a fervent dedication to live only for art and art alone. The fellow Abstract Expressionist had changed de Kooning from a nice Dutch boy who painted houses into a hipster whose worst fear was being “mainstream”.

By the late 1950s, de Kooning had managed to achieve the position of the “it” guy within the New York City art scene. With his “I don’t care” attitude and pack of nonconformist friends (Jasper Johns  and Jackson Pollock anyone?) he captivated the general public not only with his work, but also with the way that he lived his life. He was basically the Regina George of the art world (Honestly, if he punched me in the face I would probably think it was awesome). Never shy of a scandal, de Kooning controversially got together with his chief artistic rival Jackson Pollock’s mistress Ruth Kligman shortly after the great artist’s death. De Kooning refused to be defined by any one movement or style, and he has even been quoted as calling theory “baloney”. Art snobs couldn’t pin him down, his paintings were selling like hotcakes, and the tabloids couldn’t get enough of his antics.

With popularity comes imitation, and de Kooning’s unprecedented style became an empty, commonly copied move. His dizzying brushstrokes that had once represented raw subjective experience were coming to signify just another cliche in the art world. Frustrated and bored, in 1959 De Kooning went on a journey Eat Pray Love style and visited Rome with the intention of finding clarity. In Rome, he was free to mope about, drink, and debate with fellow artist friends. Oh, and of course he engaged in his favorite pastime: bedding an endless stream of bright young women! After getting his fill abroad, he came back to the states and painted this work of art, naming it after the lush park in Rome.

Villa Borghese looks calm, cool and collected when one compares it with the artist’s earlier works (like the Woman series), but de Kooning was particularly unsettled during the time that he painted this. The blues and greens suggest a return to the natural world, and the wide brushstrokes are reminiscent of the newly constructed highways that would take de Kooning to his final home in the Hamptons. Yet, even after his trip to Rome, de Kooning was still immensely dissatisfied with stardom and he itched for yet another change of scenery.

“You have to change to stay the same”, de Kooning stated, and this rings true as one looks at his works, from the messy chaotic style of the Woman series (1950-1953) to the broad, calmer brushstrokes in Villa Borghese and other works from the late 1950s and 1960s. Villa Borghese represents just one of the many moments of stylistic change in his career, but the artist himself remained characteristically turbulent in relationships and personal matters. Until his dying day, de Kooning remained the disturbed bad boy that everyone wanted a piece of.