Digging for Dali DNA - August 12, 2008
Following on from Polish rejection of attempts to analyse the DNA of Chopin, a woman who says she is the daughter of Salvador Dali has started another testing debate.
A woman identified in the Daily Telegraph as Pilar A says the artist is her father but initial DNA testing on skin and hair from his iconic moustache has proven inconclusive. She has called in the lawyers and says she may even try to exhume Dali’s remains, having not been satisfied with the response of his estate to her attempts to establish paternity.
Pilar A says more DNA testing has been done by the estate, but she has not been told of the results by the estate, controlled by Dali’s friend Robert Descharnes. However Robert Descharnes’s son is quoted as saying that the doctor undertaking the paternity test told him verbally there was no Dali link to Pilar A (the Telegraph calls the son Richard; El Mundo calls him Nicolas).
And, proving beyond doubt that internet language translation cannot be trusted, ABC Spain (via Google language tools) provides us with this appropriately surrealist gem as the intro of their coverage:
Only ‘you lack the mustache’ (of the Salvador Dalí, which hedgehogs into the sky), confesses that he told Robert Descharnes-friend and collaborator of genius ampurdanés for forty years-nothing else see it.
Image: Dali, by Roger Higgins via Wikimedia and the Library of Congress
