Dali exhumation reveals his moustache ‘perfectly intact’
SALVADOR DALÍ’S famous moustache remains in a perfect state, its handlebars “marking 10 past 10” as he wished, witnesses to the surrealist artist’s exhumation for DNA testing said yesterday.
Narcís Bardalet, Dalí’s embalmer, said that upon opening the crypt, his body was found to be exactly as it was when it was interred 28 years ago.
“His moustache remains intact, marking 10 past 10, as he desired. It’s a miracle,” Mr Bardalet told local TV. “Dalí will be with us for a long time.”
The Spanish master was raised from his tomb in his home town of Figueres late on Thursday night in an operation to settle a paternity claim from a fortune teller that she is his love child.
Pilar Abel, 61, also from Figueres, has been fighting for more than a decade to prove she is Dalí’s daughter, claiming to have learnt from her mother and grandmother that she was the product of an affair with the married artist.
In June Ms Abel won a court order to exhume Dalí’s body, a judge ruling there was no other way to settle the claim. The artist’s two tibias have been extracted as well as nails and teeth, and will be taken to Madrid for testing before being replaced. Lluís Peñuelas, secretary of the Gala-salvador Dalí Foundation, said the foundation, which administers Dalí’s estate, regards the exhumation as “inappropriate” and Ms Abel’s claim as “baseless”.
Ms Abel told The Daily Telegraph that she was unconcerned by the criticism, and dismissed the foundation’s questioning of the court order as “pathetic”. She said: “I am very happy because at last it’s going to come to light, and this means a lot, it doesn’t matter to me what the foundation says.”
Just 15 people were present at the night-time exhumation as cranes lifted the hefty tombstone from the crypt beneath the stage in the artist’s self-designed Theatre-museum.