Dali’s body to be exhumed for paternity test
Spanish woman, 60, wins judicial order to conduct DNA extraction on painter’s body
A60-year-old Spanish woman has succeeded in winning a judicial order to have the body of surrealist painter Salvador Dali exhumed for DNA extraction so that she can know whether she is his daughter.
Dali died in 1989 at 85 and was previously thought to be childless — even largely celibate — though Pilar Abel, a tarot card reader, has been claiming since 2007 that her mother told her at a young age of a shortlived, clandestine affair with the artist in the mid-1950s. She says her grandmother knew of the affair and would tell her that she was “strange, like your father.”
Dali’s cryptic, enchanting work was ultimately worth hundreds of millions of dollars put together, and he bequeathed it all to the Spanish state upon his death. Abel, a divorced mother of four, has said her main goal is to establish paternity, but after filing a lawsuit in 2015, she told The New York Times that she was also seeking “whatever corresponds to me.”
Abel has worked as a tarot card reader for decades, sometimes appearing on television, but she also told the Times that she did not read her own cards, by principle, and that exhumation was necessary to confirm her lineage once and for all.
Dali is buried underneath the theatre in his Catalonian hometown of Figueres, which was converted into a museum for his work and is one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions. In life, Dal was known to be deeply eccentric, as was his only wife, Gala. For much of their marriage they lived separately, with Gala residing in a medieval castle in a small village and Dal allowed to visit only upon her written invitation.
A fire in the castle in 1984, two years after Gala’s death, almost killed Dali. An assistant of his, Robert Descharnes, pulled him out of the smouldering building. Dali was hospitalised and fed by nasal tubes. In 2007, Abel contacted Descharnes, who still was in possession of some of the nasal tubes. He agreed to submit them for a DNA test, but the results were inconclusive. The date for the exhumation has not been set.