George Rodrigue: Before the Blue Dog
“A Toast to Cajun Food,” by George Rodrigue, courtesy Louisiana State Museums
January 2025The Louisiana State Museum celebrates the late Cajun artist’s early works and lasting legacy with a doggone great exhibit at the Cabildo.
– by Doug Brantley
He stands at attention at the intersection of Royal Street and Père Antoine Alley, guarding over his master’s domain, his yellow eyes reflected in the glass, peering out at passersby. Watching, waiting.
But this is no ordinary doggie in the window. The revolving, three-sided chrome sculpture is one of thousands of depictions George Rodrigue produced of his beloved Blue Dog over the course of his prolific 40-plus-year career.
The Rodrigue Gallery, 730 Royal Street, photo courtesy George Rodrigue Studios
Step inside the late Louisiana artist’s eponymous gallery, and you’ll find original Blue Dog oil paintings adorning the walls, an entire room of Blue Dog silkscreen prints, an entry table ladened with Blue Dog-themed books, cases of Blue Dog sterling silver jewelry, even a Blue Dog-detailed Harley.
A Blue Dog Harley in the Rodrigue Gallery, 730 Royal Street, a short walk from the show at the Cabildo, photo by Ellis Anderson
While the iconic canine may have brought him international fame and dominate the gallery, it was just one of a dozen different series Rodrigue created prior to his death in 2013.
Works from his Hurricanes and Bodies series are represented here as well, along with a smattering of early landscapes and depictions of Cajun life – which you’ll discover many more of at the nearby Cabildo on Jackson Square.
The Louisiana State Museum’s Rodrigue: Before the Blue Dog exhibit spotlights more than 50 of the New Iberia-born artist’s works, painted largely during the Cajun Revival movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. Themes range from dark, moody pastoral scenes to studies of the Acadians’ “Grand Dérangement” expulsion from Nova Scotia to joyful reflections on colorful Cajun life.
A few of the Rodrigue works in the Cabildo show, photo by Ellis Anderson
“There may not be another artist as committed as George Rodrigue to preserving and celebrating Cajun cultural heritage,” says Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, who oversees the Office of State Museums.
“His early works tell the story of a group of people who forged a new identity upon their arrival in Louisiana, who created a culture that is as unique as Louisiana.”
Continuing through September, the exhibition couples Rodrigue’s paintings with objects related to Cajun country (a fiddle, an accordion, duck decoys, a pirogue) culled from the museum’s permanent collection, interspersed with wall-sized images of the artist at work.
Rodrigue often painted from reference photos he took of his subjects, and a number are displayed next to the finished pieces. And, yes, there are even a few Blue Dogs on view (including the very first, “Watchdog,” commissioned in 1984 for a book of Louisiana ghost stories). The colorful canine never strays far.
“Watchdog,” the very first Blue Dog in the Cabildo show, photo by Ellis Anderson
Tiffany, Rodrigue’s model for the Blue Dog
“For George, the Blue Dog was very much an extension of the Cajun series, it wasn’t necessarily something different,” says wife Wendy Rodrigue Mangus (who, following his death, remarried Rodrigue’s friend and fellow artist Douglas Mangus, who collaborated with him on the Blue Dog jewelry line).
“It was still George painting and growing and expanding on his canvas, just like he was growing and expanding and getting brighter in his life.”
The exhibit coincides with the release of “Blue: The Life and Art of George Rodrigue,” a feature-length documentary produced by WLAE that will air nationally on almost all 600 PBS stations beginning in June. Snippets from the film are also included in the exhibit (and are on loop at the gallery as well).
The documentary features cameos from Wendy and first wife, Veronica – along with sons André and Jacques – James Carville, Emeril Lagasse, Marc Morial, James Michalopoulos and many others. It spans the entirety of Rodrigue’s career, tracing his talent timeline back to age nine.
Stricken with polio in 1953, Rodrigue spent a full year bedridden. To stave off boredom, his mother bought him a paint-by-numbers kit of da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”
“But I didn’t like to paint in between the lines,” Rodrigue recounts in the documentary, “so I turned the canvas over and painted pictures on the backside,” conjuring images of alligators, crawfish and his two dogs.
“The first painting he ever saw by anybody in his life,” notes Wendy, “was his own.”
He would go on to study at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, before being accepted into the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.
“He had never been west of Texas,” says son Jacques. “And his classmates didn’t know what the word ‘Cajun’ even was. If they didn’t know that, they certainly didn’t know about his history and his family’s history.
“And he could see it firsthand eroding away, as South Louisiana got more and more Americanized, with television and radio and all of those outside influences. So, he made it his mission to come back and document the culture.”
While in L.A., Rodrigue attended an early Andy Warhol exhibit at the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery, where he was struck by the Pop artist’s use of serial imagery.
“That concept really stuck with him when he moved back to Louisiana and started looking at the landscape and saw the repetitive oak tree in every photograph he would take,” adds Jacques. “So, the oak tree became like his Campbell’s soup can.”
One of Rodrigue’s early landscapes, photo by Ellis Anderson
Rodrigue’s signature oaks – a nod to Longfellow’s “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie” and Cajun culture itself – are featured in almost all of the paintings in the Cabildo exhibit, even that initial Blue Dog. It wasn’t until 1991’s “Loup-Garou” that they began disappearing from his backgrounds.
Critics were initially dismissive, calling Rodrigue’s brooding landscapes dreary and monotonous, and dubbing the artist “Johnny One Note.” So, he began adding figures to his works, perhaps most famously in 1971’s “The Aioli Dinner.”
“The Aioli Dinner,” one of the most celebrated Rodrigue paintings, courtesy Rodrigue Gallery
Depicting his grandfather and friends gathered under one of his ever-looming oaks, the painting became one of his most celebrated and one he never sold. And he even replicated that one, inserting the Blue Dog among the group in 1997’s “Eat, Drink, and Forget the Blues,” which serves as the exhibition’s title image.
“The people who are critical of the Blue Dog often said, ‘Anyone can do that,’” says Wendy, who managed the French Quarter gallery (in addition to those in Lafayette, Carmel, and Munich) for close to three decades and continues to tirelessly champion the artist through her George Rodrigue Life & Legacy Foundation.
“But no. If that was the case, that’s what would be happening instead. It’s the fact that it’s Rodrigue and the way he paints, and that there’s all those Cajun paintings beneath it as well.”
A few of the Rodrigue works in the Cabildo show, photo by Ellis Anderson
Critics be damned, Rodrigue would amass a catalog of more than 3,500 works in the ensuing years, including commissions from three U.S. presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton), celebrities (Whoopi Goldberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone), and major corporations (Xerox, Absolute Vodka, Neiman Marcus).
But much like his wildly popular Blue Dog, despite his increasing fame and acclaim, Rodrigue never strayed far from home at heart. When the couple moved to Carmel in 2000, Wendy recalls a Los Angeles Times reporter asked, “‘Mr. Rodrigue, now that you’re living in California, are you going to paint the redwoods?’”
“George looked at him and said, ‘Why would I do that? My landscape is in here,’ and put his hand on his chest, and that is always Louisiana.’”
“High Water at Whiskey Bay,” 1975, image courtesy Louisiana State Museums
Louisianans returned that love twofold. The New Orleans Museum of Art’s 2008 Rodrigue retrospective still ranks as one of its most attended, bested only by its legendary Tutankhamun exhibit, which drew close to 900,000 visitors. And his adoration and influence continue more than a decade after his death.
Since its inception in 2009, the George Rodrigue Foundation of the Arts, which advocates for including art curriculums in schools, has nurtured the state’s youth through programs such as “George’s Art Closet,” which helps fund art supplies, and its annual art and songwriting contests.
“With the self-confidence and imagination that art skills teach you, you can do anything,” says Jacques, who serves as executive director of the foundation, of its mission.
“That’s what Dad learned – from I don’t know where – for a kid from New Iberia to become internationally recognized as a great artist. We hope to instill that in students and do as they learn his story.”
Wendy likewise shares Rodrigue’s art and life lessons on her Life & Legacy tours, visiting 49 schools nationwide and interacting with thousands of students last year alone, adding to the more than 800 “unplugged” presentations she’s made since starting in 2017. In early April, she’ll drop into Kenner Discovery High School and the Willow School.
Wendy Rodrigue Mangus with a student group, courtesy Wendy Rodrigue Mangus
“I want to make George real for people,” she says. “I’ve seen him, in recent years, become almost mythic. That’s weird for me, as his wife, because for me he was just George, you know?
“Particularly, when it comes to children, I want him to be relatable. That he was an only child who grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana and spent his afternoons sitting on the banks of Bayou Teche drawing, and nights on the roof of his house staring at the stars. He was a kid, with dreams, and he followed them. And that everybody can do that. Everybody.”
It's that relatability, that boy-from-the-bayou sensibility inherent in his early paintings and resonating throughout Rodrigue’s career, Nungesser notes, that is at the core of the Cabildo exhibit.
“It’s personal to me because I knew George,” he says, “and I know what a wonderful person he was, besides what a great artist he was. He was just an incredible human being who gave so much back to the community.”
Wendy Rodrigue Mangus at the Cabildo for the installation of the new Rodrigue show, Before the Blue Dog, courtesy Wendy Rodrigue Mangus
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