In his treatise on design and expression in the visual arts, Taylor (1964) states that “a work of art is more than an artistic equilibrium; but it is always committed to being at least that. A work which achieves less is artistically incomplete. A work which is committed to achieving less has not the status of art at all” (p. 28). For centuries artists and writers on Western art have asserted, like Taylor, that balance is the primary design principle guiding the distribution of the various elements within a work. According to this view, balance is necessary because it unifies the structural elements of a visual display into a cohesive narrative statement thereby creating the essential integrity or meaning of the work.

A pictorial configuration is said to be balanced when its elements and their qualities are poised or organized about a balancing center so that they appear anchored and stable. The simplest and most obvious sort of balance is the phenomenon of symmetry. A symmetric display is one in which there is an exact one-to-one correspondence of components about a center line or a central point. For example, when one half of a composition appears as the “mirror image” of the other, it is said to exhibit a formal type of balance called bilateral symmetry.

Far more complex and interesting are objects and images whose elements are grouped or organized asymmetrically about a balancing center in such a way that their visual forces compensate one another. This type of equilibrium is referred to as dynamic balance. Studies of the relationship between aesthetic preference and the organizational structure of paintings and pictures have established that there are three major stimulus features that contribute to a composition’s perceived balance. They are: (a) the distribution of “weight” about the axes of the pictorial field (especially about the vertical and horizontal axes), (b) cue directionality (principally with respect to left–right lateral organization), and (c) the location of the area of principal interest or greatest weight. Books on composition present a variety of techniques by which an artist can control these three relations in pictorial space to achieve balance.

Empirical support for the theoretical principles concerning the nature of pictorial balance found in these writings has been reported by Locher et al. (1996) and McManus et al. (1985). Participants in the research of Locher et al. identified the balancing centers of reproductions of 20th-century paintings and then assigned “weights” to the pictorial features which contributed to the location of the balancing center of each work. They found that design and museum professionals and individuals untrained in the visual arts were in good agreement as to the location of the balancing center of the paintings and the location in the field of the areas of visual weight which formed the structural framework underlying the balance organization of a painting.

McManus et al. (1985) had subjects judge the balance center of reproductions of works of art by placing a fulcrum beneath each composition at the point at which the painting would “hang level” on the fulcrum. Participants, who had no special training in art, showed good agreement as to the location of the balance centers.Additionally, McManus et al. reported that the location of the balance center of a picture differed from that of a “chopped” version of it created by removing a peripheral portion from one end of the original. Because the arrangement of elements within both versions remained the same, they concluded that no one pictorial feature (or features) was the origin or determinant of balance. Rather, participants’ judgments arose from a global percept based on an integration of stimulus information across the entire picture field.
Not only is balance an important design principle in the practice of art at the highest level, as mentioned above, it has been found to play a similarly dominant role in the production of drawings by children. For example, Golomb (1987b) investigated development of the graphic planning strategies of children ranging in age from 3 to 14. She observed that young children’s drawings are characterized by arrangements of figures that are arbitrarily dispersed across a page. By approximately age 9, Golomb found that children create order among the elements of a pictorial space using strategies that she described in terms of two organizing principles, namely, an alignment of figures within a horizontal–vertical grid, and a centric system that privileges the center of the display and leads to various forms of complex symmetry and balance. These strategies remained unchanged through age 14, the oldest age group included in Golomb’s study. Using the assessment instrument employed by Golomb (1987b), Golomb (1987a) observed that alignment and symmetry/balance graphic strategies also dominated the drawings of severely emotionally disturbed children between the ages of 11 and 14. Golomb (1987a) concluded that development of these strategies occurs independently of emotional disturbance and remains relatively unaffected by psychopathology.