Kim Kardashian’s First Auction Purchase Was a Monet Painting Because of the Film ‘Clueless’

In Citizen Kim, Jonathan Van Meter’s biography of Kim Kardashian, the author reveals that the billionaire reality TV star and Skims founder owns a painting by Claude Monet.

In an excerpt published by The Hollywood Reporter, Van Meter writes that Kardashian bought the Monet because of Clueless, the 1995 film starring Alicia Silverstone. “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.

Clueless was released when Kardashian was 14, and she has called it one of her favorite films. Silverstone’s character, Cher Horowitz, is the daughter of a hard-nosed litigator, much like Kardashian’s late father, the attorney Robert Kardashian. One of Cher’s best-known lines is “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 the line is “the reason I bought my Monet. The first real piece of art that I bought—myself—was a Monet. Because in the movie they called the girls ‘a Monet’ if they look good from afar, but up close they’re just a mess.”

In the book, Kardashian says she bought the painting at auction while she was in Rome with Kim Jones, Fendi’s former artistic director of womenswear, who worked with her on a Fendi x Skims collection. “I really wanted this Monet painting because it’s a gray Monet—a pretty landscape, but gray. … I really wanted it for my Tadao Ando house in Palm Springs, which is all concrete. And I’m bidding and I’m bidding, and it was the first auction that I ever did, so I didn’t really know how they worked,” Kardashian told Van Meter. “But you get really into it. So Kim Jones is there with me and he’s like, ‘GET IT!’ So I bid on it. I win. And I went over what my budget was because you’re in the moment.” The Fendi x Skims collaboration was announced in 2021, which suggests that the Monet was bought around that time.

In a 2020 interview with E!, Kardashian says that the best gift she’s ever received is a Lucio Fontana painting. A white Fontana canvas can be seen above a fireplace in a 2022 Vogue tour of her home.