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Luisa Casati, Carmen Tórtola Valencia, and Teresa Wilms Montt were transgressive women reluctant to conform to established bourgeois norms. At the end of the 19th century, all three embraced novel concepts such as anarchism, apathy, spleen, occultism, and hyperesthesia. Their beauty was captured by European and Latin American portrait artists, and their understanding of art was recorded in texts written by the leading literary figures of the time. Luisa Casati (1881-1957), Tórtola Valencia (1882-1955), and Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921) shared a devotion to the effects of toxic substances. They embodied the ideal of the cosmopolitan and elegant woman, straddling respectability and a thirst for unknown pleasures, a duality partly marked by their constant use of psychotropic drugs and their open display of sexual freedom. The three women, whose lives were completely different, were united by their transgressions and by the mixture of fascination and repudiation they garnered in their wake. The extravagant Marquise Luisa Casati--a woman easily identifiable by her red hair, kohl-lined eyes, white face, and baroque wardrobe inspired by the Russian Ballets--was the heiress to the largest Italian fortune at the beginning of the 20th century. The care she took in cultivating an ambiguous image, somewhere between cultured and frivolous, led the marquise to explore the wide range of fin-de-siècle affections, among which drugs are depicted as the triumph of the artificial over the natural. Neat and extravagant, the figure of Tórtola Valencia possesses the charm of duality: the dancer was addicted to morphine, had multiple lovers to disguise her latent homosexuality, and became a regular at disreputable slums. Teresa Wilms Montt, a Chilean poet and storyteller, was known in Spanish intellectual circles as Teresa de la Cruz. Art, beauty, independence, freedom, and rebellion were the writer's cornerstones. She lived a rootless life on the margins of society. She was a "true bohemian."
About the author
Sofía Barrón es Doctora en Historia del Arte por la Universitat de València. Actualmente ejerce como Profesora Doctora Acreditada en la Universidad Internacional de Valencia (VIU), donde también coordina el Grado en Educación Primaria. Además, ejerce como directora artística del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Vicente Aguilera Cerni de Vilafamés (MACVAC). Su labor investigadora está centrada en la pintura española del entresiglos XIX-XX y del siglo XX, con especial atención a la construcción visual en torno a las drogas y al análisis de la producción artística de mujeres. A este respecto ha publicado en revistas académicas de alto impacto como Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, Asparkía y Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII. Historia del Arte. Entre sus contribuciones destacan capítulos de libro como 'Fantasías opiómanas. La imagen de la mujer en la estampa orientalista decimonónica' (Ulises Ediciones Expandidas, 2025), 'El esnobismo perverso. La imagen pictórica y literaria de la adicta burguesa a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX' (Dykinson, 2022) y 'Picasso y Cornuty. La absenta como adicción cambiosecular europea' (Universidad de Colonia, 2015). Es autora, asimismo, del volumen ¡Pisa morena! Cuplé, copla y baile en época de Joaquín Sorolla (Generalitat Valenciana, 2013). Su trayectoria incluye el comisariado de exposiciones y la participación como ponente en diversos congresos nacionales e internacionales sobre arte y literatura.
