The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (review)

Arnheim marked the 20th anniversary of The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts with an entirely rewritten version, one that offers a more systematic analysis of what originated as a semi-improvisational study of universal principles of composition based in phenomena of perception that he set forth in Art and Visual Perception. The Power of the Center explores more fully the subject of composition, the schema of visual organization that springs from a foundational base of human functioning to be understood as an ordering principle. Conceived of in the earlier book as gestalt simplicity, the second edition of Arnheim's Power differs from the first in advancing his argument from the primary features of salient artworks to the analytic resources of psychology rather than the other way around. He takes as his underlying thesis a belief in the power of compositional devices to elucidate the human condition epitomized by the interaction of centric (gravitational) and eccentric (dynamic) tendencies. His book argues that pictorial composition provides evidence of the innate and twofold action of all beings: human freedom that is aimed at overcoming resistance to weight, also realized as the tension between the generating core of the self and the interaction with other social centers. He compares this human condition to the activity of birds and insects "flying through the air to display their triumph over the impediment of weight," with motion the "privilege of living things" (dead things being immobilized by their heaviness).

While Arnheim's text is composed of numerous geometric configurations of horizontal and vertical surfaces as axiomatic structures, his existential musings on the intrinsic significance of their spatial and kinesthetic effects provide stepping stones to deeper existential musings, many embellished with eloquent poetic metaphors: "I feel like a mere husk," he writes on gravity, whereby the "surrender of the self's prerogative as a center puts the person . . . at the mercy of eccentric outer powers." One section compares the axes of a diagram to the branches of a tree or the arms of a person's body, wherein he notes that the center "breaks up the unity of the horizontal bar and transforms it into a pair of symmetrical wings," with the vertical bar barely acknowledging the crossing. In another passage on the attraction exerted by secondary centers, we are "invited to sense the particular kind of equilibrium into which the partners of the action have settled." Further on he laments quite purposefully the loss of the Temple of Vesta's original crown, reducing it to a "flimsy replacement" with Corinthian columns that move skyward "all but flipping off the makeshift cover of the roof."

The body of the text is given over to documentation in the form of chapters that detail such subjects as various types of optical centers (mid-points, mandalas, isocephalist arrangements); implicit, geometric and dynamic centers; eccentric foci, visual weight, energy fields and directional vectors. He considers frames, enclosures and referents beyond the frame as well as compositional divisions, borders, picture-boxes and prosceniums. Representational formats such as the tondo and the square are shown to be models of radical centricity, duality and cosmic symbolism. Extending a discussion of Michelangelo's Donni Tondo to the geometry of the circle in Constructivist and Suprematist abstractions by such painters as Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky and Rodchenko, he compares attributes of roundness and symmetry to holistic coordinates of a stable and timeless universe.

Among the dynamic constituents of visual hubs he includes spirals, intersections, crossings and bridging devices, bipolarities, estrangements and separations. The "curious tension" created dynamically by the spatial arrangement of figural groups in Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques (1905-1906), for example, results in the centric symmetry of two inverted contradictions: functional detachment counteracted by physical contact, and functional attraction overcome by physical separation. But reaching past both...