Salvador Dali's Scandal After His Death

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Almost thirty years after his death, the painter Salvador Dalí is the center of a scandal that could - literally - remove him from his grave, as a Madrid court ordered the exhumation of his body, after a woman named Pilar filed a lawsuit to be recognized as his daughter.

According to the newspaper El País, the 61-year-old woman and mother of four daughters stated: “I am very happy. Now the truth of what my DNA is will be known and perhaps I will keep quiet about my mouth, for my family and for my mother.”

Dalí's alleged illegitimate daughter has been assuring her relationship with the master of surreal painting for almost ten years, who died in early 1989, without leaving any direct descendants.

In the absence of other biological remains, it is essential to study the DNA of the painter's body in order to carry out the comparative sample with the applicant, according to María del Mar Crespo, the magistrate in charge of the case.

According to documents delivered to the court, María Pilar Abel Martínez was born in Figueres on February 1, 1956 as a product “of a friendship that became love in hiding” between Salvador Dalí and his mother, who is now 87 years and still lives in that town.

The couple would have met in Cadaqués, where she worked as an employee in the house where Dalí and his wife Gala used to spend seasons in the town. The lawsuit indicates that Abel's mother told him on several occasions that she was the daughter of the famous painter, something that she also would have confessed to other people.

The plaintiff also assures that even her paternal grandmother had knowledge of her true origin, since she would have said: "I know that you are not my son's daughter, that you are a great painter, but I love you the same."

Although there is no date yet for the exhumation, the Dalí Foundation, the painter's legal heir, is already preparing an appeal to oppose it, which will be presented in the coming days, according to one of his lawyers, in a statement.