Adya & Otto van Rees
At the heart of the avant-garde

Musée de Montmartre

from 20 March to 13 September, 2026
12, rue Cortot, 75018 Paris
museedemontmartre.fr

Adya & Otto van Rees. Au cœur des avant-gardes

The Musée de Montmartre presents, 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.

Otto et Adya van Rees : an artist couple

Through around a hundred works – paintings, graphic arts, embroidery, sculptures, decorative arts and family creations – from French, Swiss and Dutch collections, the exhibition traces the evolution of their artistic careers, from Divisionism to Cubism and Cloisonnism, and finally to Abstraction.

The exhibition follows their work chronologically, highlighting its richness, modernity and evolution, while exploring the mutual influences and artistic dialogue that fuelled their creative research.

It also offers a glimpse into the personal lives of Otto and Adya: a couple united by love, two artists fully devoted to their practice, whose daily lives, including the birth of their three children and the family trials they endured, were intertwined with and nourished their artistic production.

Providing a major discovery of their works, this exhibition rehabilitates the bold and experimental contribution of Otto and Adya van Rees, highlighting their respective places in the history of modern art.

Poster of the exhibition 'Adya & Otto van Rees. At the heart of the avant-garde'

Two unique trajectories at the heart of the avant-garde

Originally from the Netherlands, Otto van Rees (1884-1957) and Adya van Rees-Dutilh (1876-1959) moved to Montmartre’s Bateau-Lavoir in 1904. They rubbed shoulders with Georges Braque, Kees van Dongen, Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso.

Born in Rotterdam in 1876 into a bourgeois family, Adya van Rees-Dutilh studied at the Blanc-Garin Academy in Brussels, one of the few art institutions open to women. Self-taught, she developed an original body of work combining painting, drawing and applied arts. A pioneer of avant-garde textile arts, she renewed embroidery by incorporating abstraction and rhythm, also experimenting with collage. She thus brought textile arts into modern art with an unprecedented experimental status. In March 1914, Guillaume Apollinaire praised her embroideries at the Salon des Indépendants. Her embroidery Le Transsibérien caused such a stir that it was attacked with a knife by a visitor — a sign of its subversive power.

Born in 1884 in Fribourg into a family of university professors, Otto van Rees grew up in Amsterdam in an intellectual and socially engaged environment. Encouraged early on in art, he received advice from his father and artists such as Jan Toorop. His painting evolved from realism to divisionism, then to cloisonnism and cubism, before exploring abstraction through dynamic and colourful compositions.

Their careers reflect an open and international artistic quest: contribution to the Dada movement in Zurich, Otto’s participation in the founding of Cercle et Carré, numerous trips throughout Europe. Their approach reveals a great formal freedom at the heart of the European avant-garde.