Genetic matter taken from the exhumed remains of the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí prove that he was not the father of a woman who claimed to be his secret love child.
“The DNA tests show that Pilar Abel is not Dali's daughter,” the foundation said in a statement.
The DNA samples were taken from the artists “skin, nail and two long bones” after Dalí was exhumed from the tomb at the museum in his Spanish hometown of Figueres in July, when it was revealed that his moustache had remained intact and in the ten-past-ten position.
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A huge fortune
Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old who long worked as a psychic in Catalonia, claimed her mother had a relationship with the artist when she worked in Cadaques, a picturesque Spanish port where the painter lived for years.
A Madrid judge last month granted her a DNA test to find out whether her allegations are true.
If Abel had been confirmed as Dalí's only child, she could have been entitled to 25 percent of the huge fortune and heritage of one of the most celebrated and prolific painters of the 20th century, the woman's lawyer Enrique Blanquez said.
Dalí's estate, which includes properties and hundreds of paintings, is entirely in the hands of the Spanish state.
The Salvador Dalí Foundation which manages the estate says it was worth nearly €400 million ($460 million) at the end of 2016.
In an interview in June, just days after a court ordered the exhumation, Abel said her grandmother had told her she was Dalí's daughter when she was seven or eight years old. Her mother admitted it much later.
Abel is from the city of Figueras, like Dalí, and she said she would often see him in the streets.
“We wouldn't say anything, we would just look at each other. But a glance is worth a thousand words,” she said.
'Known in the village'
A question has always hung over his sexuality, with some claiming he was a closet homosexual who preferred to watch others having sex rather than taking part.
But according to Abel's lawyer Blanquez, his affair was “known in the village, there are people who have testified before a notary”.
Born on May 11, 1904 in Figueras to a bourgeois family, Dalí developed an interest in painting from an early age.
In 1922 he began studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Madrid where he developed his first avant-garde artistic ideas in association with poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
Soon he left for Paris to join the surrealist movement, giving the school his own personal twist and rocketing to fame with works such as “The Great Masturbator.”
Returning to Catalonia after 12 years, he invited French poet Paul Eluard and his Russian wife Elena Ivanovna Diakonova to Cadaques.
She became his muse — he gave her the pet name Gala — and remained at his side for the rest of her life.
They never had children and she died in 1982, seven years before Dalí's death.
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