A truly surreal case

> The late Salvador Dali’s vast estate is at stake in a paternity suit launched by a woman eager to prove the iconic artist is her father

collected hair, teeth and nail samples, as well as two long bones, which will be put back in place once the DNA testing is completed.

Abel wants to be recognised as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a “clandestine love affair” that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.

Notoriously eccentric, Dali’s life was marked as much by the genius of his work as by his own extravagances.

He died at 84 in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship: Gala moved to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and Dalí could visit her there only if she extended a written invitation.

Abel filed her lawsuit in 2015 against the Spanish government and the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation.

In an interview shortly after starting legal action, she said that she wanted recognition as Dalí’s daughter, and “after that, whatever corresponds to me”.

At the time, Abel explained that she, rather than her mother, Antonia Martínez de Haro, filed the lawsuit because the mother was in poor health and experiencing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Abel’s mother spent several summers in Port Lligat, working mostly as a nanny for different families living near Dalí’s home.

The foundation said in a statement that it considered the exhumation “entirely inappropriate,” given that “there is no evidence that claimant Pilar Abel Martínez’s claim has any legal basis”.

In an interview with AFP last month, just days after a court ordered the exhumation, Abel said her grandmother first told her she was Dali’s daughter when she was seven or eight years old, and her mother admitted it much later.

Abel is from the city of Figueres, like Dali, and she said she would often see him in the streets.

“We wouldn’t say anything, we would just look at each other. But a glance is worth a thousand words,” she said. – Agencies

Who’s your daddy? ... Abel (far left) claims that the renowned surrealist Dali (left) is her biological father, leading to the exhumation of his remains (top) in her attempt to receive her share of his multimillion dollar fortune.