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Forța centrului vizual. Un studiu al compoziției în artele vizuale
Using a wealth of examples, Arnheim considers the factors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
214 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
16 people are currently reading
435 people want to read
About the author
Rudolf Arnheim
90 books131 followersRudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art. His magnum opus was his book Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and America. Most notably, Arnheim taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 25, 2017
The world is being blinded by the tidal wave of photographs pushed through social media. So much noise, so little of lasting value.
And if like me, you aspire to artistic photography .."not through argument but through feeling", working to "close the gap between you and everything that is not you" [to quote "Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes], then perhaps going back to some "basics" is just the tonic the gin ordered.
Enter: "The Power of the Centre" ("POC") by Rudolf Arnheim, a study of composition in the visual arts. Arnheim can't write, but we can forgive him that given that his project was to explore the cognitive basis of art, and by extension, the world. His classic work, "Art and Visual Perception" was ground-breaking, but hard work. The POC is far easier to read even given its dry academic style.
Effort is rewarded though.
The argument builds. From an introduction into spatial systems and force fields, a comprehensive analysis of many examples of art follows taking each element that creates visual perception: centres, hubs and weight, frames, volumes and nodes, latches and vectors. The book springs to life as it examines the perceptual forces that make some pictures "work". My favourite examples include Manet's Le Rendez-Vous de Chats (1870) for its Latch, Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques (1905) for its Hubs, and Munch's Sick Girl (1896) for the effect of its square Frame.
But useful as I found the book, I also felt slightly becalmed. We are given glimpses of a more fundamental underlying psychological imperative at work, as in the chapter on "The Viewer as Centre" and "Seeing the World Sideways" - "... the difficulty is that we look at our world sideways. Instead of facing it as a detached viewer, we are in it and of it. ... our view interprets and misinterprets our position". But we are left without a wind in our sails. What psychological universals are at work in our visual apprehension of the world? How do these reveal the workings of our minds?
A tad unfair of me? Perhaps! But if nothing else, this book woke me up to some basic insights into what makes a picture grab a viewer. In these times of 40 plus billion photographs being published annually, I need every little help I can get!
And if like me, you aspire to artistic photography .."not through argument but through feeling", working to "close the gap between you and everything that is not you" [to quote "Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes], then perhaps going back to some "basics" is just the tonic the gin ordered.
Enter: "The Power of the Centre" ("POC") by Rudolf Arnheim, a study of composition in the visual arts. Arnheim can't write, but we can forgive him that given that his project was to explore the cognitive basis of art, and by extension, the world. His classic work, "Art and Visual Perception" was ground-breaking, but hard work. The POC is far easier to read even given its dry academic style.
Effort is rewarded though.
The argument builds. From an introduction into spatial systems and force fields, a comprehensive analysis of many examples of art follows taking each element that creates visual perception: centres, hubs and weight, frames, volumes and nodes, latches and vectors. The book springs to life as it examines the perceptual forces that make some pictures "work". My favourite examples include Manet's Le Rendez-Vous de Chats (1870) for its Latch, Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques (1905) for its Hubs, and Munch's Sick Girl (1896) for the effect of its square Frame.
But useful as I found the book, I also felt slightly becalmed. We are given glimpses of a more fundamental underlying psychological imperative at work, as in the chapter on "The Viewer as Centre" and "Seeing the World Sideways" - "... the difficulty is that we look at our world sideways. Instead of facing it as a detached viewer, we are in it and of it. ... our view interprets and misinterprets our position". But we are left without a wind in our sails. What psychological universals are at work in our visual apprehension of the world? How do these reveal the workings of our minds?
A tad unfair of me? Perhaps! But if nothing else, this book woke me up to some basic insights into what makes a picture grab a viewer. In these times of 40 plus billion photographs being published annually, I need every little help I can get!
August 12, 2020
Already by page 8 this book had changed my whole way of seeing art.
October 24, 2018
Excerpt from Chapter 2, on the varieties of visual weight:
“Distance increases visual weight. This statement contradicts what we know from physics. The gravitational law of the inverse square states that physical attraction diminishes with the square of the distance. Since gravitational attraction determines physical weight, it follows that objects become lighter with increasing distance from the center of the earth. To be sure, for terrestrial purposes the effect is minimal, but it predicts the opposite of what we find visually. When perception is anchored to the center of attraction, visual weight increases with distance.”
1. Newton’s “gravitational law of the inverse square” - or just the inverse square law - is not an intuitive concept for most people without a science (physics) background.
2. After confusing said most people, he then dismisses it as being minimal for “terrestrial objects” anyway, so what was the point? Why couldn’t you just say why/when visual weight increases with distance? The inverse square law was never meant to be applied to “terrestrial objects” in the first place, and unless you’re making outer space art bringing up this law was entirely pointless.
As an artist who used to be an electrical engineer, I read this book because it sounded promising on connecting art and science. But it was an overly long and dry and unnecessarily complex book. The intended audience is clearly not artists and offers minimal useful insights for art making. (Another paragraph in another chapter includes a very convoluted wording on perspective in painting/2D art and that it attempts to create the illusion of depth. This is another useless statement, like saying I ate food because it’s meant to make me not hungry. No really? But then he has the audacity to go on saying that it is the act of the viewer looking at the art which gives it depth, basically undermining the work of the artist and the effort it takes to do correct perspective. If a painting is not being looked at, it “has no depth” because it’s not being utilized.)
The book reads as though he did research and didn’t want any of it to go to waste so he jams all of it in, like the excerpt above. I give it a generous 3 stars because it does offer some interesting ideas, however the book got irritatingly hard to read the more I read it. It’s a book of a dude who has a giant boner for himself and his mind/research. So if you’re into overly complicated books that never get to the point, this is for you.
“Distance increases visual weight. This statement contradicts what we know from physics. The gravitational law of the inverse square states that physical attraction diminishes with the square of the distance. Since gravitational attraction determines physical weight, it follows that objects become lighter with increasing distance from the center of the earth. To be sure, for terrestrial purposes the effect is minimal, but it predicts the opposite of what we find visually. When perception is anchored to the center of attraction, visual weight increases with distance.”
1. Newton’s “gravitational law of the inverse square” - or just the inverse square law - is not an intuitive concept for most people without a science (physics) background.
2. After confusing said most people, he then dismisses it as being minimal for “terrestrial objects” anyway, so what was the point? Why couldn’t you just say why/when visual weight increases with distance? The inverse square law was never meant to be applied to “terrestrial objects” in the first place, and unless you’re making outer space art bringing up this law was entirely pointless.
As an artist who used to be an electrical engineer, I read this book because it sounded promising on connecting art and science. But it was an overly long and dry and unnecessarily complex book. The intended audience is clearly not artists and offers minimal useful insights for art making. (Another paragraph in another chapter includes a very convoluted wording on perspective in painting/2D art and that it attempts to create the illusion of depth. This is another useless statement, like saying I ate food because it’s meant to make me not hungry. No really? But then he has the audacity to go on saying that it is the act of the viewer looking at the art which gives it depth, basically undermining the work of the artist and the effort it takes to do correct perspective. If a painting is not being looked at, it “has no depth” because it’s not being utilized.)
The book reads as though he did research and didn’t want any of it to go to waste so he jams all of it in, like the excerpt above. I give it a generous 3 stars because it does offer some interesting ideas, however the book got irritatingly hard to read the more I read it. It’s a book of a dude who has a giant boner for himself and his mind/research. So if you’re into overly complicated books that never get to the point, this is for you.
April 15, 2023
Strong introduction to the concept of the centre as an ordering feature of composition. Feels like a stepping stone to further theories and systems, Arnheim identifies the fundamental unit but does not propose a full system to describe its use and functionality.
May 17, 2024
A focused look at the elements of composition in traditional visual art (i.e. framed* works, whatever the media, and freestanding sculpture) and architecture. In contrast to his weighty tome "Art & Visual Perception," which covers composition, shapes, colors, relationships between depicted objects in a work, this much shorter book addresses only two concepts in composition--centricity and eccentricity. Centricity describes the idea that any frame contains a center that is undeniable and will be sensed as important. Eccentricity has nothing to do with oddity, but rather the use of vectors that move across, around and from the center to provide a dynamic sense in the use of the space within the shape of the frame. He uses plentiful examples from existing works to show these concepts, and to distinguish between their use on the frontal plane of the picture vs. their use in the creation of depth-space (or lack of it) in representational work. The book helps in understanding how different those two things are, and how the work of art resides in the former not only the latter (along with the fact the work is made of paint, whatever it represents).
Arnheim believes that there is a physical basis for the longstanding use of these concepts in visual art, that has to do with how the human mind receives information from the retina and processes it in the neural networks of the brain. In some other works, he goes into much more detail about the psychological testing of children (and even animals) that shows how these concepts and others around color and the like develop from how humans see and experience visual and spatial reality. Ultimately I believe it is his point that the majority of humans have a common visual and spatial experience of the world that allows us to find common ground as humans through the experience of making and looking at art, and that means art has a critical role in making and keeping us human. He says, (p. 217) "My work is based on the conviction that one of the most necessary human occupations is the creation of objects or performances whose visual structure elucidates and interprets human experiences by its directly perceived expression."
He concludes this book with a brief and touching view of the question of whether artists consciously make use of principles of composition or if, instead, they compose intuitively, through some basic human understanding of how to create an ordered world, within the frame, that appeals to humans due to the order in the brain. He says this all a lot more eloquently than I do. He thinks that people educated in composition are most likely to do both (I agree with him) but that the "miracle" occurs when the two approaches are spontaneously one. I know from experience that looking at art refines one's sense of how to make a picture "work," and it doesn't hurt to think about how the work functions after it's made, when you are making it yourself, but it is not unlike poetry. The poet is a person with a poetic "soul," who sees the world poetically, and a visual artist is a person who for whatever reason has a sensitivity to the way things look and fit together. I think part of the joy of life for the artist is making that happen in the space of a frame in order to draw intentioned and considered attention to the possibilities. That's what the frame is for--to say, stop here, look at this.
---
* while Arnheim does discuss "picture frames," the use of the word frame has to do with the defined shape of the medium on which the work of art is created. For much of Western art, of course, for centuries that has been mainly a rectangle -- but he treats also the tondo (round) shape, sculpture and the scroll of Asian tradition as well. The dominance of the rectangle, well, he has his reasons for that as well, but you'll have to read the book to get into that!!
Arnheim believes that there is a physical basis for the longstanding use of these concepts in visual art, that has to do with how the human mind receives information from the retina and processes it in the neural networks of the brain. In some other works, he goes into much more detail about the psychological testing of children (and even animals) that shows how these concepts and others around color and the like develop from how humans see and experience visual and spatial reality. Ultimately I believe it is his point that the majority of humans have a common visual and spatial experience of the world that allows us to find common ground as humans through the experience of making and looking at art, and that means art has a critical role in making and keeping us human. He says, (p. 217) "My work is based on the conviction that one of the most necessary human occupations is the creation of objects or performances whose visual structure elucidates and interprets human experiences by its directly perceived expression."
He concludes this book with a brief and touching view of the question of whether artists consciously make use of principles of composition or if, instead, they compose intuitively, through some basic human understanding of how to create an ordered world, within the frame, that appeals to humans due to the order in the brain. He says this all a lot more eloquently than I do. He thinks that people educated in composition are most likely to do both (I agree with him) but that the "miracle" occurs when the two approaches are spontaneously one. I know from experience that looking at art refines one's sense of how to make a picture "work," and it doesn't hurt to think about how the work functions after it's made, when you are making it yourself, but it is not unlike poetry. The poet is a person with a poetic "soul," who sees the world poetically, and a visual artist is a person who for whatever reason has a sensitivity to the way things look and fit together. I think part of the joy of life for the artist is making that happen in the space of a frame in order to draw intentioned and considered attention to the possibilities. That's what the frame is for--to say, stop here, look at this.
---
* while Arnheim does discuss "picture frames," the use of the word frame has to do with the defined shape of the medium on which the work of art is created. For much of Western art, of course, for centuries that has been mainly a rectangle -- but he treats also the tondo (round) shape, sculpture and the scroll of Asian tradition as well. The dominance of the rectangle, well, he has his reasons for that as well, but you'll have to read the book to get into that!!
May 9, 2023
How to scientifically explain the principles of compositions as percieved by the human mind.
A very great work that shows examples from classical art along with well explained arguments on different aspects that are reffering to the center of the composition and each variation has it's own impact and it's own importance for the viewer.
Not only you'll have a better understanding of the composition, in general [being it painting, sculpture, architecture, etc] but as an artist, you'll be able to manage your own work much better by applying some principles explained in this book.
Seeing this subject scientifically debunked through a psychological and scientific point of view it shows how art [the capacity of the human mind to create work that will be appreciated for it's aesthetics and/or emotional expression] is interconnected with the rest of the life areas and it is basically a language that all people can have an interpretation and understanding of.
A very great work that shows examples from classical art along with well explained arguments on different aspects that are reffering to the center of the composition and each variation has it's own impact and it's own importance for the viewer.
Not only you'll have a better understanding of the composition, in general [being it painting, sculpture, architecture, etc] but as an artist, you'll be able to manage your own work much better by applying some principles explained in this book.
Seeing this subject scientifically debunked through a psychological and scientific point of view it shows how art [the capacity of the human mind to create work that will be appreciated for it's aesthetics and/or emotional expression] is interconnected with the rest of the life areas and it is basically a language that all people can have an interpretation and understanding of.
January 21, 2018
A lot of good insights, but, man, was this hard to read: jargony with lots of long sentences. You can sense that German was the author's first language.
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December 22, 2021Hay que estar atento a la versión que se ha traducido, pues el autor ha escrito más de una en inglés. La traducción al español es una de ellas.
September 10, 2013
This is an amazing and extremely though-provoking book. It reveals, with a huge number of interesting and relevant examples, the dynamics of the "center". The workings of the mind - of the artist and the viewer - is explored in great detail. By ending with a psychological overlay, the book stresses its applicability to daily life. It will definitely make me think of art, but life in general, much more differently.
August 20, 2008
Best book I've read on composition.
March 5, 2014
Unele concepte au fost destul de greu de înțeles pentru mine. Nu e o carte 'for dummies', dar am aflat câteva lucruri interesante privitoare la compoziție în pictură.
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January 30, 2017saeid izadi
March 31, 2024
Is Arnheim the most authoritative voice on composition? Does this book provide the most fundamental and comprehensive conceptual tools for the artist/designer? Maybe. I'm still looking.
August 29, 2017
Testo eccellente, sperimentale e insieme rigoroso, ricco di esempi e idee da studiare. È una miniera di riflessioni per chiunque si occupi di rappresentazione e composizione nello spazio.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews