In surrealist twist, Dali’s remains are exhumed in paternity lawsuit
FIGUERES, Spain — Salvador Dali’s eccentric artistic and personal history has taken yet another bizarre turn with the exhumation of his embalmed remains 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 northeastern Spanish town of Figueres, where the artist was born and later returned with his Russian wife Gala.
Catalonia’s High Court said late Thursday that biological samples were found 27 years after Dali’s body was embalmed and interred in a museum dedicated to the painter’s memory also in Figueres. The samples need to travel to a legal medicine lab in Madrid for analysis, which could take weeks.
The sensitive exhumation by a team of forensic experts followed two decades of court battles by 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 said when the judge ruled in her favor. Abel said a desire to honor 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 Abel would give her a chance to seek one-fourth of Dali’s estate in further lawsuits, in accordance with inheritance laws in Spain’s Catalonia region.
Dali and his wife had no children of their own although Gala, who died seven years before him, had a daughter from an earlier marriage to French poet Paul Eluard.
Upon his death in 1989 at age 84, Dali bestowed his estate to the Spanish state. His body was buried in his hometown’s local theater, which had been rebuilt to honor the artist in the 1960s. The building now hosts the Dali Theatre Museum.
After the gates of the premises closed Thursday, a 1.5-ton stone slab was removed to open the crypt with Dali’s remains. In order to lessen the risk of contaminating any biological samples, only five people — a judge, three forensic experts and an assistant— stayed during the hour and 20 minutes that the coffin stayed open.
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.