Turns out death doesn’t get you out of everything.
When a Spanish woman recently alleged that Salvador Dali is her father, a judge ordered to have his body exhumed for a paternity test.
It’s been 28 years since the surrealist painter lay his paintbrush and body to rest, in 1989 at the age of 85. The artist departed with no known offspring. According to the BBC, the judge said there are no remaining “biological remains” that could be used in the test. Sounds challenging.
The would-be daughter of Dali is 61-year-old Maria Pilar Abel Martinez, a tarot card reader from Girona, Spain. (It just keeps getting better!) She alleges that her mother, a maid named Antonia, had an affair with Dali in 1955, when she was working for a family in Cadaques, Spain, near where Dali lived with his then-wife and muse, Gala (Elena Ivanovna Diakonov).
After the alleged affair, Antonia got married, moved and gave birth to Martinez in 1956. Martinez says growing up, her mother would tell her again and again that Dali was her father. Martinez once quipped to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, “all I’m missing is a moustache.” !
This isn’t the first time Martinez has tried to make the case for Dali being her padre. According to the BBC, she first made the paternity claim in 2015. Why didn’t she go after the “Great Masturbator” when he was still breathing?
If she wins the suit, she would take Dali’s surname and potentially gain access to part of his estate, after first requesting it from the state of Spain. Sounds like a lot of…roja cinta.
The Dali Foundation, which manages the estate, plans to appeal the order in the next couple days.
We kind of hope Dali does get exhumed, because that sounds awesome and eerie, like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story or a Pedro Almodovar film, a la “Volver.” And you gotta figure that the man who is rumored to have once said, “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs,” would probably be into it.
