Court orders Salvador Dalí's body be exhumed for paternity test

June 26, 2017 4:09 PM

[surreal]
posted by adept256 (32 comments total)

The Persistence of Maury
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:15 PM on June 26, 2017 [19 favorites]

Can't we just let melting clocks lie?
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:16 PM on June 26, 2017 [11 favorites]

Kind of appropriate in that the story looks enticingly weird at first sight but quickly turns out to be about money.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:36 PM on June 26, 2017 [35 favorites]

Me, reading the news earlier today: Well that's the most surreal thing I'll see all day.
Me, later about to watch the latest ep of Twin Peaks: Hold your absinthe!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:39 PM on June 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

Unless there's more to this tale that mentioned in the story (i.e. evidence that her mother and Dali at least met), it seems a case of a court supporting a vexatious litigant. I'm not super reverent about graves, but I'd be pretty annoyed if random people claiming paternity without at least a scrap of evidence meant my relatives got dug up.
posted by tavella at 5:20 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Inconveniently for Twitter, Dali was not part of the Dada Movement.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:22 PM on June 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

That I know of.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:23 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Was he buried with an exotic pet?
posted by WhitenoisE at 5:49 PM on June 26, 2017

Dali was not part of the Dada Movement.

I think the Surrealists threw him out, too, for politics.

yeah...
While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art. Leading surrealist André Breton accused Dalí of defending the "new" and "irrational" in "the Hitler phenomenon", but Dalí quickly rejected this claim, saying, "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention".[36] Dalí insisted that surrealism could exist in an apolitical context and refused to explicitly denounce fascism.[37] Among other factors, this had landed him in trouble with his colleagues. Later in 1934, Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group.[27] To this, Dalí retorted, "I myself am surrealism".[22]
posted by thelonius at 5:57 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

And when they opened the tomb, all that they found... was a giraffe, still burning.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:16 PM on June 26, 2017 [30 favorites]

Mr. Dali....You are....the father...
posted by Increase at 6:18 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Me, reading the news earlier today: Well that's the most surreal thing I'll see all day.
Me, later about to watch the latest ep of Twin Peaks: Hold your absinthe!

Yeah, no.

If that is decent absinthe, the only way I will be holding it is in my belly.
posted by Samizdata at 6:56 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Paging Mr. Dali to the courtesy phone.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:20 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Samizdata, a girlfriend and I decided to try absinthe, though she added to it extra wormwood. We did the whole thing with the sugarcube and the fire. I took the first sip and I had an out of body experience. My Body told me, Adept, you have 15 seconds to put your head in a toilet bowl. 14... 13...

I am putting my lemur on top of your iphone, because sand is a bible. Dali.
posted by adept256 at 7:55 PM on June 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Maybe they will lay his head on a Surrealistic Pillow.
posted by Oyéah at 8:00 PM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I *knew* that whole shtick with the lobster on a leash was some sort of fetish play. I just hope dear old Admiral Akbar sees what's coming before... well, you know.
posted by mwhybark at 8:55 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Dali never told you what happened to your father...
posted by blue_beetle at 9:41 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Every time I hear about Dali, I remember the backflap text that said he once courted a woman, a fellow artist, by covering his body in blue paint and goat poop and crawling around on all fours as a mating ritual. This is, like, my only factoid about this great man.
posted by Omnomnom at 11:25 PM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art.

He also cozied up to the Franco regime, which is why he lived comfortably in Port Lligat while his Residencia de Estudiantes friend Luis Buñuel spent most of his life in exile in Mexico and France.

Paternity suits aren't terribly uncommon in Spain. Back in the mid-century it used to be because the young masters of well off families took liberties with the housemaids, later on because there is a terrible epidemic of allergy to condom latex in Spanish males. Terrible.

Anyway, the previous similar high profile case was of a daughter of José María Ruiz Mateos (a local businessman and famous tax fraudster). They exhumed his corpse and the DNA test was positive. It's still in the courts, though.
posted by sukeban at 12:04 AM on June 27, 2017 [8 favorites]

Samizdata, a girlfriend and I decided to try absinthe, though she added to it extra wormwood. We did the whole thing with the sugarcube and the fire. I took the first sip and I had an out of body experience. My Body told me, Adept, you have 15 seconds to put your head in a toilet bowl. 14... 13...

Ahhh, la méthode de Bohême. I am more a méthode parisienne man myself. What I had was lovely, despite not living up to its hallucinogenic legend. Most delicious printed material (customs thing. I didn't BUY the absinthe, just the lovely label attached to it, apparently) I have ever drank. Never tripped on it, but I did get pleasantly tipsy rather promptly. (Before you ask, it was an imported (just that bottle, via courier), distilled French absinthe, not that nasty macerated Czech stuff.)
posted by Samizdata at 2:15 AM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Abel says she was conceived in 1955 when her mother was working for a family in Cadaqués, a fishing village near where Dalí’s family had a holiday home and which is also the setting for many of his paintings.

Maybe.

Or perhaps an old fisherman twirls his peculiar moustache.
posted by pracowity at 2:22 AM on June 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Dali was sort of "The Walt Disney of Weird." He took a lot of ideas from people trying to use art for political and humanist aims and rebranded it as his own and commoditized and branded it for market. First time I took an art history course and got exposure to the work of de Chirico and others like him who preceded Dali but without the go-go capitalism marketing sheen, it was a little disillusioning. Although to be fair, more derivative than advertised or not, Dali could actually work a paint brush really well. If this claim turns out to be a fraud, I'm not sure he would disapprove. He'd probably relish the grotesqueness of the scenario. He loved debasing the feminine ideal. Kind of fitting he gets dug back up now, being a weirdly characteristically American-seeming fusion of visionary and huckster at a time so dominated by branding and that kind of aggressive self promotion.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:04 AM on June 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

He loved debasing the feminine ideal.

Did he? Did he love that?
posted by adept256 at 5:36 AM on June 27, 2017

Well, he seemed to anyway. I don't know how he actually felt about it. Not intending to argue for old gender essentialist norms and ideas, just noting he often conspicuously took them on in his work.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:48 AM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Court orders Salvador Dalí's body be exhumed for paternity test

"The difference between me and a dead man is that I am not dead."

Dali was sort of "The Walt Disney of Weird." He took a lot of ideas from people trying to use art for political and humanist aims and rebranded it as his own and commoditized and branded it for market.

"The difference between me and a dead man is that I am not dead."™

Dada Dali goodbye, Dada Dali don't sigh
Your soft alarm clocks quake me
So boil your beans and meet me at Perpignan Station
Crutch me Dali again, Lobster telephone friend
Stay in your seat, watch what you eat
If you don't get a* dead mule then you'll know I'm in heat
Dada Dali hello, Dada Dali you're
just another onionhead . . .

-- with apologies and a tip of the skull to Todd Grunion (AWATS).
-----------------------------------------------
* Yes, I realize that's not a Dali. However . . .
posted by Herodios at 6:41 AM on June 27, 2017

Did he? Did he love that?

That's what was said. What do you even mean by this? Given that this is Metafilter, you are probably trying to communicate outrage at something you consider to be unacceptable, but you haven't succeeded in communicating what that is.
posted by thelonius at 7:09 AM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

"Ms. Abel, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that the paternity test proved you are indeed the daughter of the master, and so entitled to a quarter of his estate. The bad news is that the only assets the estate has left are his collection of rhino horns that he used as paintbrushes, which you can't really do much with. You certainly can't sell them or anything. But -- they're yours. We'd appreciate it if you could pick them up by Friday, because they take up quite a bit of space in our office. You'll need a truck."
posted by Capt. Renault at 7:09 AM on June 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Not exactly clear on what that side-eye was about, adept256. Apologies if it seemed I was implying special knowledge or insight into Dali's psyche. I only meant he revisited those themes, especially in his film work, a lot.

The other surrealists and Dadaists tried to reject him and distance themselves from him, but his work [pdf warning] forever became the public face of those movements anyway, shifting the focus away from the original anti-fascist critical aims of the movement and redirecting that energy into more politically conventional and status quo reaffirming spectacle that was fascist-friendly. His work was skillfully executed and is amazing to view up close in real life due to its massive scale (kind of a funny accidental "bigger = better" American cultural convergence joke to be made there, I guess). Max Ernst is my personal favorite among the surrealists, though.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:17 AM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

shifting the focus away from the original anti-fascist critical aims of the movement and redirecting that energy into more politically conventional and status quo reaffirming spectacle that was fascist-friendly.

Wow. Good thing he didn't play blues guitar, too.

Max Ernst is my personal favorite among the surrealists, though.

Yves Tanguy. Son of a sea captain and one-time merchant marine, nearly all of his best works feature a clear but unreachable horizon line. Abstract figures mixing biological and technological features litter these landscapes, like forensic photos of a UFO crash site*. Easy to imagine them used to illustrate science fiction paperbacks, tho' I've never seen them used thus.

And Tanguy himself didn't wear a waxed moustache, but looked | like Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre playing the Joker in a Batman movie. What's not to love?

-----------------------------------
* Or the arcade game Battle Zone / Tank Commander
posted by Herodios at 8:29 AM on June 27, 2017

So let me get this right: Ms. Abel was born in 1956, which would have made her 33 years old when Dali died in 1989, or already more than old enough to have had a chance to establish he was her biological father. In fact, nothing I've found says she tried to prove Dali was Daddy until about a dozen years ago, long after Dali's death and long after he could have defended himself.

Ms. Abel says she learned "the truth" about her parentage from her grandmother, who --- like Dali, her legal father, her mother, and everyone else concerned --- were all conveniently dead by the time Ms. Abel filed her first lawsuit, and unable to speak for themselves.

The only sure thing in all this is, nobody ever goes to court to be proven to be the undiscovered lovechild of poor folks.
posted by easily confused at 3:26 PM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Nobody spending money to prove paternity of poor people is pretty much orthogonal to whether Abel's father is Dali.

Also without money being involved would either party in a dispute like this have standing to force a test?
posted by Mitheral at 7:08 PM on June 27, 2017

Thank you Herodius- evidently Tanguy and Dali were smoking out of the same pipe! Or Dali boosted his work and added his own flourishes. I do have to say, his very craven devotion to the cult of money was something that attracted me to his work as a young person. It was the antithesis of what I thought of as an artistic view of the world. I went to Figueres, Spain when I was backpacking to specifically see his work- the one in the courtyard has stayed with me all these years as a marvel of both engineering and downright throwing everything but the kitchen sink into it.

The Courtyard, with fertility goddess

I don't think this really gets into the "meaning" but it certainly gives you an overview . And my understanding is that the car belonged to Al Capone
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 10:41 PM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]