A Spanish judge has ordered the exhumation of Salvador Dalí's body for DNA testing to settle a claim by a TV fortune-teller that she is the secret daughter of the Surrealist painter.

Pilar Abel Martínez, 61, from Dalí's home town of Figueres in Catalonia, has for years insisted that she is the product of a "clandestine love affair" between her mother and the then married artist. She is now suing the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation and the Spanish state, which inherited his works, to be recognised as his biological daughter. The verdict is due later this year.

Ms Abel, who describes herself as "Dalí without the moustache" for her supposed physical resemblance to the painter, previously arranged to carry out a test using material from his death mask. However insufficient DNA was found, and the Madrid judge overseeing the case has now ruled there is no other way to obtain samples other than to disinter Dalí’s remains.

No date for the exhumation has yet been announced, but, according to Ms Abel’s lawyer, it could be carried out as soon as July. It will be neither an easy nor a discreet procedure: the artist’s body is buried in a crypt beneath the stage in the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, where he died from heart failure in 1989, aged 84.