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Kim Kardashian owns a Claude Monet painting — and the reason she bought it traces back to a teenage obsession with a 1990s teen comedy. A new biography reveals that the reality TV star and Skims founder purchased the work because of a famous line from the 1995 film Clueless.
A Clueless Connection
The revelation appears in Citizen Kim, a biography written by Jonathan Van Meter. An excerpt from the book ran in The Hollywood Reporter. In it, Van Meter explains that Kardashian’s motivation had nothing to do with art world exposure or museum visits.
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“Kim bought a Monet not because she had visited the famous Water Lilies at l’Orangerie in Paris or under the art world tutelage of Kanye West,” Van Meter writes. Instead, the inspiration came directly from Clueless.
The film came out when Kardashian was 14, and she has named it as one of her all-time favorites. In the movie, Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher Horowitz delivers one of cinema’s most quoted lines: “She’s a full-on Monet. It’s like a painting, see? From far away it’s OK, but up close it’s a big ol’ mess.”
Kardashian told Van Meter that line stayed with her. “The first real piece of art that I bought — myself — was a Monet,” she said. “Because in the movie they called the girls ‘a Monet’ if they look good from afar, but up close they’re just a mess.”
Bidding at Auction in Rome
Kardashian bought the painting at auction while visiting Rome. She was there with Kim Jones, who at the time served as Fendi’s artistic director of womenswear. Jones had collaborated with Kardashian on the Fendi x Skims collection, announced in 2021, which suggests the auction took place around that period.
She described the painting as a gray Monet landscape. Her goal was to display it in her Tadao Ando-designed home in Palm Springs, which features an all-concrete interior. “I really wanted this Monet painting because it’s a gray Monet — a pretty landscape, but gray,” she told Van Meter.
The auction itself was a first for Kardashian. She admitted she did not fully understand how the bidding process worked. However, the excitement of the moment took over. “Kim Jones is there with me and he’s like, ‘GET IT!'” she recalled. “So I bid on it. I win. And I went over what my budget was because you’re in the moment.”
Art Beyond the Monet
The Monet is not the only significant artwork in Kardashian’s collection. In a 2020 interview with E!, she named a Lucio Fontana painting as the best gift she had ever received. A white Fontana canvas also appeared above a fireplace during a 2022 Vogue home tour.
Together, the works point to a personal and evolving interest in art. In Kardashian’s case, that interest began not in a gallery, but in a movie theater — watching a fictional teenager coin a phrase that would eventually lead to a real Monet hanging on her wall.
