On 21 June 1914, Laurencin married German-born painter Baron Otto von Waëtjen, a union that would soon force her into wartime exile.
On 21 June 1914, Marie Laurencin married Baron Otto von Waëtjen, a German-born painter, in a union that connected her personally to a nation that would, within weeks, become France's wartime enemy. The timing of the marriage proved historically fateful: the outbreak of the First World War that August meant that as the wife of a German national, Laurencin lost her French citizenship under the laws of the period.
This forced the couple into exile, and they spent the war years moving through Spain and Germany, a disruption that removed Laurencin from the Parisian avant-garde circles—including her former close ties to Guillaume Apollinaire and the Cubist painters—that had nurtured her early career. The years of exile were personally and professionally difficult, marked by financial precarity and separation from the artistic networks central to her identity as a painter.
The marriage itself was troubled and the couple divorced in 1921, after which Laurencin returned to Paris and reestablished her career, eventually becoming one of the most sought-after portraitists and illustrators of the interwar period. The episode illustrates the intersection of personal life with the geopolitical upheavals of the era, and how legal nationality rules of early twentieth-century Europe could dramatically alter the trajectory of an artist's life and work.