A throwaway gag in a 1990s teen film lies behind Kim Kardashian's first art purchase. Jonathan Van Meter's authorised biography, Citizen Kim, discloses that the reality television star and Skims founder owns a Claude Monet painting, and that she bought it because of Clueless, the 1995 comedy starring Alicia Silverstone. An excerpt from the book was published by The Hollywood Reporter.

In the film, Cher's circle describes a girl as a full-on Monet, like a painting that looks fine from far away but a mess up close. Kardashian, who was 14 when Clueless reached cinemas and counts it among her favourite films, told Van Meter that the line was the reason she bought the picture. She was clear the purchase had nothing to do with visiting the Water Lilies at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, or with the guidance of her former husband Kanye West.

She bought the work at auction in Rome, accompanied by Kim Jones, the former artistic director of womenswear at Fendi, with whom she was working on a Fendi x Skims collection. She wanted the grey landscape, she said, for her Tadao Ando-designed concrete house in Palm Springs. Bidding for the first time, she got carried away and went over her budget, egged on by Jones, but she won the painting. The Fendi x Skims collaboration was announced in 2021, suggesting the purchase was made around that time.

The Monet was the first work Kardashian chose and bought for herself, though not the first artwork in her life: she has said the best gift she ever received was a Lucio Fontana painting, a white canvas visible above a fireplace in a 2022 Vogue tour of her home.