The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Dali’s body exhumed for paternity test
Tarot card reader says she was born after her mother had affair
Salvador Dali’s embalmed remains have been exhumed in order to find genetic samples that could settle whether one of the founding figures of surrealism fathered a girl decades ago.
Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old tarot card reader, claims her mother had an affair with Dali while working as a domestic helper in the Spanish town of Figueres, where the artist was born and later returned with his Russian wife Gala.
Catalonia’s High Court said that biological samples were found 27 years after Dali’s body was embalmed and interred in a museum dedicated to the painter’s memory in Figueres.
The samples need to travel to a legal medicine lab in Madrid for analysis, which could take weeks, officials said.
The sensitive exhumation by a team of forensic experts followed two decades of court battles by Ms Abel. In June, a Madrid judge finally ruled that a DNA test should be performed to find out whether her allegations were true.
“I am amazed and very happy because justice may be delivered,” she had told The Associated Press when the judge ruled in her favour.
She said a desire to honour her mother’s memory was motivating her paternity lawsuit: “I have fought a long time for this and I think I have the right to know.”
Her lawyer, Enrique Blanquez, said a judicial victory for Ms Abel would give her a chance to seek a quarter of Dali’s estate in further lawsuits, in accordance with inheritance rules in Spain’s Catalonia region.
Dali and his wife had no children of their own although Gala – whose name at birth was Elena Ivanovna Diakonova and who died seven years before the painter – had a daughter from an earlier marriage to French poet Paul Eluard.
Upon his death in 1989 aged 84, Dali bestowed his estate to the Spanish state. His body was buried in his hometown’s local theatre, which had been rebuilt to honour the artist in the 1960s and now hosts the Dali Theatre Museum.
After the gates of the premises closed on Thursday, a 1.5-ton stone slab was removed to open the crypt with Dali’s remains.
It remains to be seen if the chemicals used for preserving the artist’s body have damaged his genetic information, said Narcis Bardalet, the forensic expert who embalmed Dali back in 1989.