JUDGE ORDERS SALVADOR DALI’S BODY EXHUMED

A 60-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 short-lived, 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.