Those in Paris for Art Basel week got a transcendent treat on Friday, when beloved singer Caroline Polachek set up shop at the Musée de l’Orangerie and sang a short program of songs, including an accompaniment to Radiohead’s “True Love Waits,” in front of Claude Monet’s famed Water Lilies cycle of canvases.

As if that weren’t enough boldfaced names in one sentence, here’s another: the singer wore a dark-hued dress by award-winning Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, with an assist by Argentine stylist Tati Cotliar (also a model who has served as the face of brands including Valentino and Versace), and the performance took place at the invitation of Klaus Biesenbach, director of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, along with art historian Olivier Berggruen, on the occasion of the Berggruen collection going on view at the Orangerie.

The song creates a vivid picture of love and abjection: “I’ll drown my beliefs / to have your babies / I’ll dress like your niece / and wash your swollen feet / Just don’t leave / don’t leave.”

“‘True Love Waits,’ like the Water Lilies, went through decades of versions and distillations… through time and loss and perseverance,” Polachek wrote in an Instagram post. Radiohead performed the song live, often acoustic, for a decade—a live version featured on 2001’s I Might Be Wrong EP—before a full-band version of the track, which almost appeared on 1997’s OK Computer, was finally included in the 2016 album A Moon-Shaped Pool.

Monet’s paintings have been on display at the Orangerie since 1927, a few months after the artist’s death. He was principally devoted to the “Nymphéas” or Water Lilies cycle since the end of the 1890s; the Orangerie’s paintings are a unique set. The artist donated them to the museum after the armistice that ended World War I in 1918 as a symbol of peace, conceiving a unique space comprising two elliptical rooms that, in the artist’s words, would give the “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.”

Polachek’s 2023 album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, received widespread acclaim, including in Variety, where Jem Aswad wrote that “she’s a deeply imaginative songwriter with the vocal range and skill to execute her unusual, intuitive melodies that recall Kate Bush and Björk but also possibly a Japanese musical influence.” She earned RIAA Gold Certification for “So Hot You’re Hurting my Feelings,” the single from her 2019 album Pang. Polachek has collaborated with many other stars, including Charli XCX, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Flume, and, with James Fauntleroy and Beyoncé, co-wrote “No Angel” (2013).

Polachek’s is the second in an ongoing series of performances Biesenbach is organizing; in the first, in April, artist Miles Greenberg performed his durational piece Sebastian for eight hours at the historic Malazzo Malipiero in Venice.