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George Rodrigue (March 13, 1944 – December 14, 2013) was an American artist who in the late 1960s began painting Louisiana landscapes, followed soon after by outdoor family gatherings and southwest Louisiana 19th-century and early 20th-century genre scenes. His paintings often include moss-clad oak trees, which are common to an area of French Louisiana known as Acadiana. In the mid-1990s Rodrigue's Blue Dog paintings, based on a Cajun legend called Loup-garou, catapulted him to worldwide fame.
His funeral Mass was open to the public and held at St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, New Orleans.
Rodrigue's early notable works include The Aioli Dinner, which divides its time between the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and The Class of Marie Courrege, which won an honorable mention from Le Salon in Paris, France, 1975, prompting the French newspaper, Le Figaro, to dub Rodrigue "America's Rousseau." His most famous works include the Acadian heroine Evangeline, portrayed in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), and the Cajun modern-day Evangeline, Jolie Blonde. He also designed three posters for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which feature portraits of Louis Armstrong, Pete Fountain and Al Hirt. Between 1985 and 1989, Rodrigue painted the Saga of the Acadians, a series of fifteen paintings chronicling the Acadian journey from France to Nova Scotia to Louisiana and ending with the official return visit to Grand Pré.
| "The yellow eyes are really the soul of the dog. He has this piercing stare. People say the dog keeps talking to them with the eyes, always saying something different. People who have seen a Blue Dog painting always remember it. They are really about life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you’re looking at him, looking for some answers, ‘Why are we here?,’ and he’s just looking back at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn’t know. You can see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers." |
| — Rodrigue on the Blue DogWilliam Yardley, George Rodrigue, Painter of Blue Dog, Dies at 69, The New York Times, December 27, 2013. Retrieved December 27, 2013. |
More recently and worldwide he is known for his creation of the Blue Dog series of paintings, featuring a blue-hued dog. He used the shape and stance of his deceased dog named Tiffany, and was primarily influenced by the loup-garou legend — the first painting in the series bears the title Watch Dog, painted for Bayou, a book of Louisiana ghost stories. The Blue Dog was made popular by Absolut Vodka in 1992, when Rodrigue was honored as an Absolut Vodka artist joining famous artists such as Andy Warhol and glass artist Hans Godo Frabel. The Blue Dog was used by both Absolut Vodka and the Xerox Corporation through national ad campaigns The ghostly blue spaniel/terrier is often featured with a white nose and yellow eyes.
Rodrigue has galleries in Carmel, California; Lafayette, Louisiana; and New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2007, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens hosted a 40-year Rodrigue retrospective exhibition, which traveled in 2008 to the New Orleans Museum of Art. Rodrigue was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on May 17, 2009. In 2011 the Boy Scouts of America honored him with the Distinguished Eagle Award. In 2013 he received the Opus Award from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
In 2004, Rodrigue came to Shreveport with another incoming Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco of Lafayette, with whom he made an appearance at the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum, where he autographed Hathaway's menu from more than twenty years earlier.
"We Will Rise Again" was the first of five works that the artist created for his new initiative, Blue Dog Relief: George Rodrigue Art Campaign for Recovery. To directly benefit the New Orleans Museum of Art, which was closed for six months due to flood damage, he also painted Throw Me Something FEMA and You Can't Drown the Blues.
Following those releases, Rodrigue launched a campaign for New Orleans levee protection. He sent prints of To Stay Alive We Need Levee 5 to every member of the U.S. Congress. Sales proceeds from silkscreen prints and related campaign materials — including T-shirts, lapel pins, bumper stickers and buttons — were donated to NOMA.
Rodrigue donated his Cut Through the Red Tape image to the United Way for use in promoting the Louisiana 2-1-1 phone system. Louisiana 2-1-1 (an easy-to-remember Information & Referral phone number) seeks to eliminate barriers to reaching human-service agencies — particularly in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
As of September 2006, the donation tally to Blue Dog Relief beneficiaries was $700,000, including a check for $100,000 that Rodrigue presented to NOMA on March 3, 2006, to help kick off its grand re-opening: "The HeART of New Orleans," a three-day weekend celebration of the arts.
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