Exposition Adya et Otto van Rees, au Coeur des Avant-Gardes + Musée

The museum is open every day from 10 am to 6 pm. Last entry 45 minutes before museum closing & galleries close at 5:45 pm. Café Renoir is open from Wednesday to Sunday, from 11 am to 5 pm. Adya & Otto van Rees.

Au cœur des avant-gardes Exhibition from 20 March to 13 September 2026 The Musée de Montmartre has the honour of presenting, for the first time in France, a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Otto and Adya van Rees, major but still little-known figures of the 20th-century European avant-garde.

Through a chronological journey, the exhibition highlights the richness, modernity, and evolution of their works while analysing the crossed influences and fertile artistic dialogue that nourished their research.

It is also an opportunity to follow the life journey of Otto and Adya: that of a man and a woman who loved each other, that of two artists who devoted themselves to art and whose intimate daily life intertwines, nourishes, and inhabits their creative work, such as the birth of their three children or the family tragedy that tested them.

Originally from the Netherlands where they met, Otto van Rees (1884-1957) and Adya van Rees-Dutilh (1876-1959) settled in Montmartre, at the Bateau-Lavoir, from 1904.

There they frequented Georges Braque, Kees van Dongen, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, in contact with whom the foundations of modernity were developed.

Their trajectory testifies to an open and resolutely international plastic research – as evidenced by their presence and common contribution to the birth of the Dada movement in Zurich, to the foundation of the Cercle et Carré group in Paris, as well as their numerous travels in Europe.

Their approach reveals great formal freedom, inscribed at the heart of the European avant-gardes. Through a hundred works from French, Swiss, and Dutch public and private collections – paintings, graphic arts, embroideries, sculptures, decorative arts projects