Dali’s remains to be dug up over paternity claim
SPAIN: A Spanish judge has ordered the exhumation of Salvador Dali’s body for DNA testing, to settle a claim by a TV fortune teller that she is the secret daughter of the Surrealist painter.
Pilar Abel Martinez, 61, from Dali’s home town of Figueres in Catalonia, has for years insisted she is the product of a ‘‘clandestine love affair’’ between her mother and the then married artist.
She is now suing the Galasalvador Dali Foundation and the Spanish state, which inherited Dali’s works, to be recognised as his biological daughter.
Abel, who describes herself as ‘‘Dali without the moustache’’, had arranged to carry out a test using material from the artist’s death mask.
However, insufficient DNA was found, and the Madrid judge overseeing the case has now ruled that there is no other way to obtain samples than to disinter Dali’s remains.
No date for the exhumation has been announced, but, according to Abel’s lawyer, it could be carried out as soon as next month.
It will be neither an easy nor a discreet procedure: the artist’s body is buried in a crypt beneath the stage in the Dali Theatremuseum in Figueres, where he died from heart failure in 1989, aged 84.
Abel, who hosted a tarot cardreading show on a local TV station, claims she learned she was Dali’s daughter as a young child, from the woman who was purportedly her paternal grandmother.
‘‘I know you’re not the daughter of my son, that you are that of a great painter, but I love you equally,’’ the grandmother used to say, according to Spanish daily El Pais, teasing Abel that she was ‘‘strange, like her father’’.
Abel’s mother, Antonia Martinez, also spoke frequently about the romance, which allegedly took place in 1955 in the nearby coastal town of Cadaques.
Dali and his wife, Gala, had returned from New York and were living in Cadaques - their house there is now a museum - while Abel’s mother was working for a local family.
Then 25, Martinez struck up a friendship with the 51-year-old artist, which allegedly developed into an affair. She returned to Figueres shortly afterwards and, while pregnant, married another man, before giving birth to Abel in February 1956.
Abel says she crossed paths with Dali four or five times, and has suggested that her gift for clairvoyance was inherited from the master of Surrealism.
The Gala-salvador Dali Foundation said it would challenge the exhumation order and was working on an appeal.
– Telegraph Group