One of the lesser-known chapters in Pablo Picasso’s vast and shape-shifting life took place in the early 1960s, when the great master of modern art took an unexpected detour: he paused painting for nearly a year to develop a television series—a dramedy no less.
At the time, Picasso was living in the south of France, well into his eighties, and surrounded by young acolytes, lovers, goats, and the flotsam of ceramic experiments. But 1962 marked a strange kind of restlessness. As he put it to a visiting journalist from Le Monde, “Painting is memory, but sometimes I want to forget. What if I tell a story instead?”
The story he chose was Pedro of Precinct 11, a semi-surreal tale about a precocious nine-year-old Spanish-American boy growing up in a rough corner of Brooklyn. The boy, Pedro, escapes a chaotic home—an alcoholic uncle, an overworked mother, a mysteriously absent father—by becoming an unofficial mascot and emotional sidekick at a local police precinct. He brings the cops coffee, absorbs their lingo, and over time starts helping them solve crimes—not with forensic brilliance, but through a Picasso-esque sense of intuition, absurdity, and emotionally symbolic thinking.
The show’s tone was uncanny: part Dragnet, part Fellini, part Leave It to Beaver, with moments of piercing melancholy. Pedro would talk to fire hydrants. Crimes were often metaphorical. In one episode, he helps “solve” a missing persons case that turns out to be a metaphor for the sergeant’s midlife crisis. Picasso wrote outlines on napkins, painted character portraits as storyboards, and insisted that Pedro be played by a silent film child actor… despite none still being alive. He considered dubbing in the voice of Anna Magnani.
CBS briefly entertained the idea, thanks in part to Jacqueline Roque’s persuasive phone calls and a surreal lunch Picasso hosted with Walter Cronkite, featuring a live goat and a reading from Don Quixote. Ultimately, the project fell apart due to creative differences, Picasso's refusal to compromise, and a pilot script that ended with Pedro ascending into the clouds on a ladder stolen from a museum.
Picasso returned to painting in early 1963 with a vengeance. The works of that period—restless, cartoonish, overfull with color and character—bear traces of Pedro. In at least one late sketch, a young boy with a badge-shaped birthmark sits beside a lion in a police uniform, both looking wistfully into the middle distance.
Art historians call this “The Pedro Interruption.” Most just call it Picasso being Picasso.
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Prompt
Describe a remarkable period in the life of Picasso, in the early 1960s. He took a hiatus from painting and tried to develop what we would now call a dramedy tv series. It centered on a nine year old boy in Brooklyn, Pedro, who would try to escape a difficult home life by hanging out in parks, libraries, and increasingly the local police station, where he helped cops solve their most difficult crimes. (He eventually returned to painting.)
