
Your Heart Is a Rare Bird: The Hidden Meanings of Marie Laurencin’s Girl’s Head
A drawing made in exile during World War I holds many mysteries, including whether it was once sent through the mail.
Anne Umland
Jan 17, 2025
The most unusual feature of Marie Laurencin’s diminutive drawing Girl’s Head is its subject’s billowing, black, cumulus-cloud-like mass of hair, which occupies more than half of the composition. The hair’s dense, velvety quality—blackest around the hidden contours of the young woman’s head, with looping strokes animating its periphery, particularly at the back—is the result of Laurencin’s energetic application of multiple strokes of charcoal, interspersed with layers of fixative to hold its powdery particles in place, and of her vigorous working and reworking to achieve her desired effect.1 The hair dominates, and serves as a foil for, the subject’s delicate facial features, deftly profiled in pencil with a sure, steady hand. A single line of charcoal traces the underside of the chin and neck, correcting an original pencil contour. At lower left is a funny, almost-cartoonish little blue bird. Rendered in crayon, it contributes a single bright pop of color to an otherwise muted composition. The bird tenderly touches its impassive companion’s chin with one wing, while seeming to gesture, in a lively fashion, with the other, to something beyond the picture’s edge.

Marie Laurencin. Girl’s Head. 1916–18. Watercolor, pencil, and crayon on paper
The drawing’s overall mood is pensive, melancholic even, in keeping with the artist’s fraught personal circumstances at the time of its making, most likely in Barcelona, between 1916 and 1918, during the First World War. Laurencin, French by birth, but newly German as the result of her recent marriage to the German aristocrat and painter Baron Otto von Wätjen, was living in exile in neutral Spain.2 Her prose poem
More than bored
Sad
More than sad
Unhappy
More than unhappy
Suffering
More than suffering
Abandoned
More than abandoned
Alone in the world
More than alone in the world
Exiled
More than exiled
Dead
More than dead
Forgotten.

Marie Laurencin. Self-Portrait (Autoportrait). 1906. Pencil on paper
As in many of Laurencin’s images of young women, the subject pictured shares several of the artist’s own features: full lips, an elegant nose, and unruly curly hair that, in photographs or earlier self-portraits, Laurencin ties back or otherwise controls, but here represents in full, chaotic abandon. At the same time, as signaled by the tiny bird’s presence and the subject’s mysterious, otherworldly aura, the drawing can be interpreted as an allegory, a picture with hidden meanings. These range from the subject’s thoughts and private inner life, literally hidden from view by the diaphanous cloud of hair, to Laurencin’s friendship and romantic relationship with the fashion designer Nicole Groult, often symbolized in the artist’s work by birds. Groult wrote to Laurencin from Paris in 1915:4
Your eyes are blue birds
Your breasts are white birds
[...]
Your heart is a rare bird
Easy to frighten
Savage -- Tender and strange
It hides to love me
And, following one of Groult’s visits to Laurencin in Barcelona, in 1916, the artist’s letters to the couple’s mutual friend and her confidante, Henri-Pierre Roché, are filled with references to Groult, along with the repeated phrase “Blue bird, color of the times, come back to us soon,” underscoring the relation in Laurencin’s mind between Groult and the bird at lower left in Girl’s Head.5
Girl’s Head was once folded in quarters, suggesting that it might have been tucked into an envelope and sent through the mail.
Close examination of Girl’s Head reveals that it was once folded in quarters, suggesting that it might have been tucked into an envelope and sent through the mail. There is also a thumbtack hole along the drawing’s upper edge, at center. Could someone—Laurencin herself? The drawing’s first owner?—have kept it tacked up on the wall, in keeping with its intimate character? The fact that Laurencin neither signed nor dated it suggests it was more of an experimental, working drawing, intended for private contemplation rather than public display. There is a tantalizing reference in one of Laurencin’s letters to Roché from Barcelona, dated May 10, 1917, in which she mentions that she is sending him two drawings, “nothing surprising,” for himself alone.6 Could Girl’s Head have been one of those drawings? Roché was living in New York at the time.7 Or might it have been in the group of Laurencin’s works on paper that Picabia brought with him from Barcelona to New York, for inclusion in Laurencin’s first one-person exhibition in the United States, at Marius de Zayas’s The Modern Gallery in May 1917?8

Marie Laurencin. Women with a Dove (Femmes a la colombe). 1919. Oil on canvas
How Laurencin’s little drawing ended up in New York as part of Lillie P. Bliss’s celebrated collection must remain, for the moment, among its hidden mysteries. Bliss, one of MoMA’s founders, knew de Zayas, and reportedly attended exhibitions at his gallery, but there is no trace in the scanty records of her collection of when, and from whom, Laurencin’s drawing was obtained.9 Following Bliss’s death, it was found in her apartment’s storage, and was included in her bequest to MoMA. It is the only work by Laurencin she is known to have owned.10
The author wishes to thank Annie Wilker, paper conservator in MoMA’s David Booth Conservation Department, for her invaluable insights into Marie Laurencin’s materials and techniques and for her knowledgeable reading of an early draft. Jelena Kristic, Lorraine Massey, Alexandra Morrison, Romy Silver-Kohn, and Lucy Winokur also provided generous help.
Girl’s Head is part of the exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern, on view at MoMA through March 29, 2025.
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These observations and others throughout regarding Laurencin’s materials and techniques are based on the author and Annie Wilker’s viewing of Girl’s Head, January 10, 2025.
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For more on Laurencin’s time in Spain, see Simonette Fraquelli, “Life in Exile: Becoming ‘Marie Laurencin’” in Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang, Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (exh. cat.) (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation, 2023): 49-59.
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Marie Laurencin, “Le calmant,” 391, no. 4 (March 25, 1917), n.p. According to Fraquelli, “Life in Exile,” 54, Laurencin helped Picabia formulate the idea for 391. The first four issues of this new journal were published in Barcelona between January and March 1917.
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Nicole Groult to Marie Laurencin, “Oiseaux,” Paris 1915, translated in Fraquelli and Kang, Marie Laurencin, 140. Regarding Groult and Laurencin’s use of birds in the love poetry they sent each other, see Rachel Silveri, “No Modernism without Marie Laurencin: Picturing Queer Femininity,” in Fraquelli and Kang, Marie Laurencin, 131.
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Laurencin to Roché, May 20 and May 26, 1916. Carleton Lake Collection, Box 229.3-7. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
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Laurencin to Roché, May 10, 1917. Carleton Lake Collection, Box 229.3-7. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
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Roché lived in New York from fall 1916 until the end of the First World War. “Henri-Pierre Roche. Paris, 1879–Paris, 1959”. Accessed January 13, 2025.
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Laurencin to Roché, January 1917. Carleton Lake Collection, Box 229.3-7. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Exhibition of Drawings and Water Colors by Marie Laurencin was held at The Modern Gallery, New York, in May 1917.
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Irene M. Walsh, “The Collecting Practice and Institutional Legacy of Lillie P. Bliss (1864–1931),” Vol. I (PhD diss.) (School of History of Art, The University of Edinburg, 2021): 137-140.
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