Picasso, cubism, and dyslexia

Dyslexia involves but neurological deficits and skills

Pablo Picasso, renowned for his avant-garde contributions to art, particularly through the introduction of cubism, stands as an iconic figure of twentieth-century art.

Cubism, the movement he spearheaded, revolutionized artistic representation by rejecting conventional perspectives. Rather than adhering to singular viewpoints of objects and scenes, cubisms sought to depict their entirety, simultaneously showing multiple sides and perspectives and challenging traditional notions of scale and dimensionality. The cubists sought to represent objects and scenes the way they really are, rather than merely how they look.

Picasso was dyslexic, something that will not surprise experts in dyslexia. Dyslexia involves neurological deficits and skills, with the source being the unusual way dyslexic brains process information.

Often identified in early schooling and called a learning disorder, dyslexia manifests as challenges in reading, spelling, sounding out words, learning new words, and remembering the names of colors and numbers. As a young student, Picasso’s teachers identified his difficulty identifying the orientation of letter symbols and cataloged him as having “reading blindness.”

Unusual skills associated with dyslexia include holistic or big-picture thinking, creativity, spatial awareness, and the ability to perceive things from multiple perspectives. Young dyslexic students have a rare ability to correctly draw three-dimensional objects.

Dyslexics are overrepresented in spatial thinking fields including art, architecture and engineering. While Picasso struggled in mainstream academic areas in school, he early on exhibited a talent and interest in drawing. Happily, his father encouraged his artistic pursuits.

John Stein is a physiology professor at Oxford University and one of the world’s leading experts on dyslexia. He says that reading, which involves linear sequencing of symbols associated with the left hemisphere of the brain, is not innate in humans and must be taught. He says dyslexic brains are underdeveloped in this area but have overdeveloped “right brain hemisphere” skills in spatial and holistic thinking and pattern recognition..

Thus, Picasso's ability to perceive and represent things in new, multidimensional ways, such as in cubism, was natural.

The following is a fascinating video, titled The Gift of Dyslexia, by John Stein.