The embalmed body of the Spanish surrealist will be exhumed to settle a paternity suit.

A judge in Spain has ordered the embalmed body of surrealist painter Salvador Dalí be exhumed in order to settle a paternity suit, against the wishes of the state-run Gala Dalí Foundation that manages the artist’s estate.

The Spanish painter, known for his iconic surrealist paintings and eccentric behaviour, died in Spain in 1989, at the age of 85. He had no children with his wife Gala (whose real name was Elena Ivanovna Diakonova), and he bestowed his estate to the Spanish state. His remains are buried in a crypt below the stage of the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Figueres in Catalonia.

Pilar Abel, a Spanish astrologer and tarot reader, who was born in 1956, claimed in 2015 that Dalí had an affair with her mother, Antonia, a maid he met in Cadaqués, Spain in the 1950s while she was working in a house belonging to friends of the artist.

Dalí and Antonia “had a friendship that developed into clandestine love”, she claimed in documents presented to the court, according to the ABC.

Spurred by her mother’s claim that Dalí was her father...