Is this the sort of surrealism the Spanish artist would have appreciated?
MADRID — The surrealist artist Salvador Dalí must be chuckling in his grave. Or raging.
A Spanish judge on Monday ordered the remains of the famous (and infamous) artist to be exhumed to settle a paternity suit, despite opposition from the state-run foundation that manages the artist’s estate.
Dalí, one of the fathers of the art movement known as Surrealism, died in 1989 and is buried in his museum in Figueres, where he was born, in the northeastern region of Catalonia. The museum is one of the most visited in Spain.
Pilar Abel, a tarot-card reader from the nearby city of Girona who was born in 1956, says she is the offspring of an affair between Dalí and her mother, Antonia.
At the time of the alleged affair, Dalí was married to the woman he considered his muse, Gala, who died seven years before the painter. Gala had a daughter from an earlier marriage but the couple had no children of their own. Upon his death, at age 84, Dalí left his considerable estate to the Spanish state.
On Monday, a Madrid court statement said that tests with DNA from Dalí’s embalmed body were necessary because there were no other existing biological remains with which to make a genetic comparison.
Abel’s court litigation started in 2015 when she sued the Ministry of Finance, as the trustee of Dalí’s estate, and the Gala Dalí Foundation that was created to administer it.
“What she wants is to have a result of the tests with full guarantee in order to finish with this as soon as possible, ” Abel’s lawyer, Enrique Blanquez, told The Associated Pres s.
If there’s a match, Abel could use Dalí as her surname and pursue further legal action to claim her rights over the artist’s work and property, which according to regional laws could amount to 25% of all of the estate.
The Gala Dalí Foundation will appeal Monday’s decision, foundation spokeswoman Imma Parada said in an e-mailed statement.
But according to Blanquez, the appeal could not immediately stop the exhuming of Dalí’s remains.
The first hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 18, the lawyer said.
Though Dalí was deeply attached to Gala, the two had an open marriage and Dalí’s sexuality has long been considered at least ambiguous. He was a close friend of the Spanish poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca, who was openly gay, and he was bereft when García Lorca was assassinated by the Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In his later years, Dalí said he was drawn to men as long as they were androgynous.
Dalí (full name: Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marqués de Dalí de Púbol) died of heart failure after a long career of worldwide artistic success and a dramatic lifestyle marked by extravagance (one of his homes was a castle in Spain) and an eccentric appearance, especially his cartoonish mustache and his habit of wearing an ermine cape and carrying a silver-handled cane. In his time, Dalí was a genuine art celebrity widely covered by the world media.
Acclaimed by critics during at the height of the Surrealist period from the mid-1920s through the early 1940s, Dalí also was widely popular for his paintings with striking dreamlike and hallucinatory images, such as the iconic melting timepieces in his best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, from 1931. Now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it is probably the most famous surrealist canvas ever painted.
Scores of contemporary artists, such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, have cited Dalí as a major inspiration. America also has a Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. By the time he died, DalÍ works were outselling other living artists but it was later discovered that many of the “Dalí prints” sold just before and after his death were not by Dalí.
Contributing: Maria Puente in McLean, Va.
