A woman claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of Salvador Dalí has initiated a legal battle to prove his paternity, and could ask for his body to be exhumed for DNA testing.

The 56-year-old woman, identified only as Pilar A., claims that the Spanish Surrealist artist had an affair with her mother, who worked as a maid for a family who spent a summer holiday in Cadaques, Catalonia, where the artist lived. She said that initial DNA testing on remnants of skin and hair from his moustache taken from a death mask of the artist last year had proved inconclusive.

She then approached custodians of his estate last December. They agreed to carry out further testing on medical samples belonging to Dalí that were stored after his death in 1989, at the age of 84. But she has told Spanish media that eight months later, she has still not been told the outcome and is taking legal action to force them to disclose the results.

A lawyer acting for the woman said: “If necessary, we will ultimately request the exhumation of his corpse.”

The artist’s estate is controlled by Robert Descharnes, a lifelong friend of Dalí’s and the artist’s official biographer. Mr. Descharnes’s son, Richard, dismissed the claim as flimsy and said he had “verbal indication” from scientists that there was no DNA link.

But Pilar A. claimed that when she met the elder Mr. Descharnes in Paris last year, he commented on her resemblance to Dalí. “He said, ‘You are only missing the moustache,'” she claimed.

Dalí was not known as a womanizer. He married his wife Gala in 1934 and the pair were inseparable until her death in 1982. They had no children.