Granted this is unpleasant, but imagine for one second that you’re very dead—extremely dead—and someone drags your bones out of your grave to play a dark(er) game of Maury. Unpleasant, right? But the good news is this isn’t happening to you; the bad news is that it’s happening to Salvador Dalí, the Spanish artist for whom the clocks melted and, possibly, a father. A Spanish court has ordered that his body be exhumed from its 28-year slumber in order to take part in a paternity test.
The New York Times told the whole, long tale of how we got here a couple years ago, but the short of it is this: a Spanish tarot card reader and astrologist named Pilar Abel claims to be the illegitimate daughter of Dalí. Her story is that Dalí and her mother met in a small fishing village where he and is wife, Gala, had a summer home. Abel’s mom was a maid for a family nearby. They grew close. It was 1955—not the summer of love, but a summer of love. Abel was born in 1956.
Her mother kept talking about her dad, Dalí, so in 2007 Abel attempted to settle paternity using nasal gastric tubes (ones that had supplied oxygen to the artist when he had been hospitalized in 1984 after getting caught in a fire, according to the Times). The results were inconclusive. His biographer, Robert Descharnes, to whom Abel reached out for help, sent the samples off to another lab in Paris, but Abel said she never heard back from the lab.
According to The Guardian, Descharnes’s son, a representative for the Dalí Foundation, which manages his estate, said that the doctor carrying out the paternity test in France had “verbally communicated” to Abel that—very Maury voice—Dalí was NOT her father.
In 2015, she took the case to court and it decided that if there was insufficient means for determining paternity, then they’d have to disturb the artist’s eternal rest for just one second. Anyway, on Monday, a Madrid judge motioned to have Dalí’s body exhumed, per the BBC (the Dalí Foundation says it plans to appeal).
How much is a bunch of bones worth? Some bunches of bones are worth more than others. Dinosaurs, for example. Those bones go for a lot. Dalí’s bones, too, are worth a good chunk of change, and they’re not even required to have the integrity of a good, museum-grade dino skeleton. I couldn’t bring myself to Google “how long does it take a human body to decompose,” but one might imagine it’s made some headway in the 30 some-odd years. Still, all Abel needs is a sample to be recognized as a part of Dalí’s legacy. The artist left his estate to the Spanish government, but as his only known heir, she stands to gain 300 million euros’ worth of artwork, plus a new last name.
