Lawsuit paints Dali as a secret father
Tarot reader says her mother had ‘a clandestine love affair’ with surrealist in the 1950s
GIRONA, SPAIN— Salvador Dali led the kind of eccentric and sensational lifestyle that might have been expected of one of the greatest surrealist painters.
However, a quarter-century after Dali’s death, tarot-card reader Pilar Abel is determined to add another twist to his story. She wants a court to recognize her as his daughter — and perhaps grant her a share of the hundreds of millions of euros worth of paintings Dali bequeathed to the Spanish state upon his death in 1989.
According to Abel’s paternity lawsuit, filed in a Madrid court in March, her mother had a “clandestine love affair” with the painter in the 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dali and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built their waterfront house.
Abel’s mother, Antonia Martinez de Haro, spent several summers in the village, working mostly as a nanny for families living near Dali’s home.
Abel, 59, said in an interview that after her mother became pregnant, she quickly married another man and had two more children with him. Abel said she was first told by her grandmother that Dali was her real father when she was 8.
She waited until about seven years ago to confront her mother about whether Dali was truly her father. “She told me yes, but that she didn’t want to throw stones on her own grave,” Abel said.
Dali died seven years after Gala, with whom he had an unorthodox and childless relationship, which included Gala’s moving to a castle overlooking Pubol, a Catalan village, and granting Dali the right to visit her there only by written invitation.
In bringing the lawsuit now, Abel said she wanted recognition as Dali’s daughter and “after that, whatever corresponds to me.” The lawsuit names the Spanish state and the foundation that was set up to administer Dali’s estate.
Her lawyer said he had not worked out her possible financial claim, but said Spain inherited Dali paintings that were reported to be worth about 300 million, or nearly $397 million Canadian.
Spain’s Culture Ministry said it could not discuss the financial value of Dali’s bequest, which a spokeswoman instead called “an asset of extraordinary cultural value.” The foundation said it had no comment on any paternity suit.
Abel said she got a former assistant and biographer of Dali’s, Robert Descharnes, to help her carry out DNA testing to confirm the paternity in 2007, but complained that she never received the test results.
The test was handled by an American toxicologist, Michael F. Rieders, who said by phone that Descharnes had initially approached him to see whether DNA testing could be used to help authenticate some of Dali’s paintings. Rieders said the test did not yield conclusive evidence that Dali had fathered a daughter.
The test relied on nasal gastric tubes that had been used to feed Dali after he was hospitalized following a fire in1984 in the Pubol castle, during which Descharnes pulled him out of his burning bedroom.
Using the tubes, Rieders said, amounted to relying on “a secondary source” for DNA sampling. For a conclusive test, he suggested, the Spanish authorities would have to grant access to Dali’s remains.
Descharnes’ son, Nicolas, said at first he had serious doubts about the plausibility of Abel’s paternity claim, but less so after studying evidence that Dali also had a half sister, the result of a relationship between Dali’s father and a young woman who worked as a housekeeper. “It could be a case of repeating the father’s history,” Nicolas Descharnes said.
Descharnes, who followed in his father’s footsteps and advises auction houses about Dali’s work, also noted that, despite extensive research, discoveries are still being made about the life and work of the painter, including The Intrauterine Birth of Salvador Dali, a painting that Dali completed as a teenager but was authenticated by experts only last year.
Summarizing the painter’s taste for enigma, Nicolas Descharnes quoted Dali as saying, “I have done paintings that are so enigmatic that it will take centuries to decrypt them.”
Francesc Bueno Celdran, Abel’s lawyer, argued that, if necessary for DNA testing, the court should demand that Dali’s body be exhumed.
The painter was buried in a crypt below the theatre of his hometown, Figueres, which he helped convert into his museum and one of Catalonia’s major tourism destinations.
As he grew older and particularly after Gala’s death, Dali suffered severe bouts of depression. However, Bueno Celdran insisted the alleged affair between Dali and Abel’s mother took place “long before the more incoherent, unstable and degenerate period of his life.”