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LONDON (AFP) – Salvador Dali's "Portrait de Paul Eluard" set a world record at Sotheby's auction house in London Thursday when it was sold for more than 13 million pounds (21.6 million dollars, 15.8 million euros).
An anonymous bidder paid 13.4 million pounds for the 1929 masterpiece, the most ever for a Surrealist work at auction, breaking a record set in London only last night for a Dali piece at auction.
The 1929 Surrealist piece portrays French poet Paul Eluard, one of the pivotal figures of the movement and demonstrates many of the key elements that defined the eccentric Spanish artist's style.
The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation issued a statement Thursday saying a Madrid court said biological samples exclude the surrealist painter as María Pilar Abel Martínez's father. The foundation said it wasn't surprised by the results of the investigation. "The unusual and unjustified court decision to practice the exhumation is confirmed as totally inadequate and disproportionate, showing its utter inadmissibility and the uselessness of the costs and damages caused of all kind, in respect of which the foundation reiterates its express right of actions," it said.
Maria Pilar Abel Martinez stands in front of Salvador Dali's Museum in Figueres, Girona, Catalonia, Spain, on June 26. A DNA concluded she's not biologically related to Dali as she claimed.
Abel Martinez, born in 1956, said her mother had an affair with Dali. The woman's mother had worked for a family whose residence in Cadaques, Spain, was near Dali's home. Abel Martinez said she had been told for years by her mother and grandmother that Dali, who is not believed to have any children, was her father. In June, a Madrid judge ordered the exhumation to settle the issue after Abel Martinez filed a legal claim to the estate. The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation manages the estate and the museum where the artist is buried.
Those involved in Dali's life suggest his fatherhood of Abel Martinez was unlikely -- particularly because he'd been classified by friends, biographers, and himself as gay and impotent. "The foundation is pleased that this report puts an end to an absurd and artificial controversy, and that the figure of Salvador Dalí remains definitively excluded from totally groundless claims," the foundation said. Dali, who died at the age of 84, is perhaps best known for The Persistence of Memory (1931), which features melting clocks in a desert landscape.
Woman claiming to be Salvador Dali's daughter isn't biologically related
