Marc Burckhardt Illustrates Kim Kardashian’s Armenian Family History for Vanity Fair
Marc Burckhardt has illustrated Kim Kardashian for Vanity Fair, creating the lead artwork for Family History: Kim Kardashian’s Armenian Dream, an exclusive extract from Jonathan Van Meter’s forthcoming biography, Citizen Kim.
Published by Vanity Fair, the feature traces Kardashian’s family history from 19th-century Armenia to California, exploring how ancestry, migration, entrepreneurship and an enduring belief in destiny became woven into one of the world’s most recognisable family stories.
Marc’s illustration accompanies a story that begins far from modern celebrity culture. Van Meter recounts an Armenian family legend surrounding an 11-year-old boy named Efim Klubnikin, who was said to have prophesied that Christians in the region should leave Armenia and travel to California.
Members of Kardashian’s paternal family subsequently emigrated to America before the Armenian genocide, establishing new lives in California. Kardashian grew up hearing the story from her father, Robert Kardashian, and her Armenian heritage has remained an important part of her public and personal identity.
Van Meter connects this family history with the extraordinary trajectory that followed: Robert Kardashian’s prominence during the O.J. Simpson trial, reality television, the emergence of social media, and Kim Kardashian’s transformation from celebrity into entrepreneur and founder of businesses including SKIMS.
The story also looks at Kardashian’s maternal family, tracing generations of independently minded women who repeatedly established shops and businesses of their own. Together, the two sides of the family become part of Van Meter’s wider argument about the combination of family, resilience, commerce, ambition and self-belief behind Kardashian’s rise.
For Marc, the commission sits naturally within a body of editorial illustration that combines classical painting, portraiture, symbolism and visual storytelling. His work often approaches contemporary subjects through the visual language of older paintings, allowing a modern figure or story to carry something more mythic, allegorical or historical.
That makes the imagery particularly suited to Kim Kardashian’s Armenian Dream: a story moving between Armenian folklore, migration, family mythology, American celebrity and the idea of destiny.
The Vanity Fair feature is adapted from Jonathan Van Meter’s new biography Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future, published by Viking on 27 October 2026.
Read Kim Kardashian’s Armenian Dream in Vanity Fair and explore more work by Marc Burckhardt through Dutch Uncle.
