Surreal! Salvador Dali's moustache remains intact, embalmer reveals after exhumation

Salvador Dalí’s famous moustache remains in a perfect state, witnesses to the surrealist artist’s exhumation for DNA testing have revealed.

Narcís Bardalet, Dalí’s embalmer, said that upon opening his crypt, the body was found to be exactly as it was when it was interred 28 years ago. 

The handlebars of his moustache were still “marking (the time of) 10 past 10” as he wished, he said.

“His moustache remains intact, marking 10 past 10, as he desired,” Mr Bardalet told local television. “It’s a miracle. Dalí will be with us for a long time”.

The Spanish master was raised from his tomb in his hometown of Figueres late on Thursday night in a highly controversial operation to settle a paternity claim from a TV fortune teller that she is his secret lovechild.

Pilar Abel, 61, also from Figueres, has for more than a decade been fighting to prove she is Dalí’s daughter, claiming to have learned from her mother and grandmother at the age of eight that she was the product of an affair with the married artist. 

Despite being dismissed by many as a fraud, Ms Abel in June won a court order to exhume Dalí’s body, a Madrid judge ruling there was no other way to settle the claim.

The artist’s two tibias have been extracted as well as nails and teeth, and will now be taken to Madrid for testing before being replaced to preserve the integrity of the body, Lluís Peñuelas, secretary of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, said.

He stressed that the Foundation, which administers Dalí’s estate, regards the exhumation as “completely inappropriate” and Ms Abel’s claim as "baseless". 

The exhumation was far from simple. Cranes were installed to lift the one and a half ton tombstone from Dalí’s crypt, which lies beneath the stage in the artist’s self-designed Theatre-Museum.

The operation took place under the cover of night, with media banned and tarpaulins placed over the top of the building to prevent drones spying from overhead. 

Just 15 people were present and all phones and cameras were prohibited to prevent images leaking out. 

Marta Felip, the mayor of Figueres, said it was “grotesque” that the fortune teller’s claim had been taken so far.

She said the results would be known in the first week of September, and said that if Ms Abel was found not to be the artist’s daughter, the Foundation and the local government would be seeking to recover their considerable costs.

But if Ms Abel is proved right, she could be entitled to a 25 percent share of Dalí's considerable estate. That will open up another legal battle with the Foundation and the Spanish state, to which he left his works. 

"The question of tracing any inheritance will be a difficult one," Michael Mylonas QC of British law firm Serjeant's Inn told The Telegraph, suggesting that the Foundation "must be feeling some heat".