The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, 20th Anniversary Edition

What determines the overall organization of visual form in the works of painting, sculpture, and architecture? Artists have sometimes ventured practical rules of thumb, and mathematicians have looked for formulas that would prescribe ideal spatial relations between shapes. This companion to Rudolf Arnheim's classic, Art and Visual Perception, shows how compositional form makes sense only when it utilizes visual symbols of the life experience that makes art meaningful.