Robert Filliou | There Was A Drawing In the Centre of this Page

 

Robert Filliou

There Was A Drawing In the Centre of this Page

Köln, Germany: Galerie and Edition Hundertmark, 1993

[24] pp., 21 x 14.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 500

One of my favorites in the Hundertmark Booklet series is not an artists' book, but this posthumous catalogue listing many of Filliou's editions and multiples (for Hundertmark, but also other publishers, such as Vice-Versand, Zona, Edition Block and other contemporaries of Armin Hundertmark). Black and white images of A Most Curious Invention of Gaga Yogi, the LEEDS card game, Information Box, the Sans Object brick,  the Optimistic Boxes, Monsters Are Inoffensive, and many other works are accompanied by brief descriptions. 

Filliou died in December of 1987, five or six years before this publication, though it's possible that it could have been arranged many years prior to publication. Dorothy Iannone contributes a two page remembrance about Filliou, his partner Marianne and their child Marcelline. She calls him warm and wise and notes that she never - in twenty years - heard him say anything trivial: 

"When he spoke it was usually of the things we care most about. He dealt with them seriously, humorously, sometimes even sadly or bitterly, at times joyously, but he always seemed to abide by the heart of the matter."

The best part of the publication is the reproduction of a drawing Filliou gifted Armin Hundertmark nearly twenty years earlier (see below), which is where the booklet takes its title, also. 

There Was A Drawing In the Centre of this Page is surprisingly still available for only 16 Euros, from the publisher, here.