[Female Narrator] This program is made possible by... Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers; Don A. Sanders Family Foundation; Henry and Pat Shane; Haynie Family Foundation; Humana; Eric and Jaclyn Dixon; Lipsey's; Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission; Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities; and the following underwriters-- [folk music] [Drew] I can't think of a symbol that represented a person as much as Blue Dog represented George Rodrigue.

[Jacques] Dad was an icon, not just for Louisiana, but for all of America.

He was big.

He was bigger than me.

[William] Everyone who knows Rodrigue's work, at some point, compares him to the American artist Andy Warhol.

The critics didn't like it, but he was selling the paintings.

He became such an icon with these blue dogs that it started spreading.

It started spreading out of Louisiana.

It started spreading in the nation.

It started spreading in the world.

It just kept going and going, and getting bigger and bigger.

[James M.] George was definitely a pioneer in terms of his expression of Cajun life.

And it wasn't till he went to art school in LA that he realized how special and unique his culture was.

[George] The more I stayed in Los Angeles, the more different I knew I was.

That was the first time I really realized that South Louisiana's different, the people are different.

I wanted to paint my early childhood feeling.

[Wendy] George didn't paint what Louisiana looks like.

George painted what Louisiana feels like.

[Marc] That's the essence of a great artist.

A great artist is defining the world that they live in.

[James] And when George came along, he was very fragile.

There was this giant "Oh, [muted]" movement that we had lost so much of our culture.

[Clancy] And it was something about those paintings.

They had a haunting quality, the darkness and the oak trees.

[Shemsi] The blue dog is rooted in a Cajun folklore story.

What he does with the Cajuns is he creates this style of working that he would refer to as Bayou Surrealism, where it's part imagined, but he's also working from photographs of people that he actually knows.

[George] I constantly carry a camera, and if I see an interesting face or an interesting person, I try to photograph them.

[singing in Louisiana French] The blue dog is tied to that, but also allows him to expand from that.

It gave me an opportunity to comment on present-day life, present circumstances.

This dog is bewildered and looking at us, "Why am I here?

What is life about?"

[Emeril] George always painted through George's eyes.

And his eyes always remembered Louisiana.

[George] I'm an artist.

I'm a Cajun.

I'm a businessman.

I give all of my energies to the canvas.

[folk music] All right, ready to roll.

Show open, please.

And in five, four, three, two, one, cue.

[Wendy] In 1984, the World's Fair was in New Orleans.

And a group of investors decided that it was a good time to put out a book of Louisiana ghost stories to commemorate the World's Fair.

One of the stories was called Watch Dog.

And it is a story about a devil dog.

One of the stories I wanted to paint was Loup-garou.

It's this crazy wolf, which was like the Boogey Man.

[Wendy] That's because this was a story his mama told him as a boy.

Heard it a lot.

It's a Cajun French story.

It's like a fictional thing that it got four-legged, I guess, didn't it?

That started to scare the [muted] out of little Cajun kids.

[Wendy] She'd say, "Baby George!

"If you're not good today, the Loup-garou is gonna eat you tonight."

As always, Dad had to work from a photograph of something.

And he found this picture of his old dog and used her as the rough model for this painting Watch Dog.

♪ Oh, if I was a dog I brought home a puppy, and she was very scruffy-looking.

A cocker spaniel/ terrier mix, kinda smart, kinda bad.

She needed an elegant name to upgrade her image.

So we called her Tiffany.

I remember her as being like my sibling, almost.

[Veronica] She used to sit at George's easel when he painted.

[Jacques] She would sit in this very unique pose with her foot out, and he would take his camera and get on her eye level, and shoot her directly on.

And so I just painted that as a Loup-garou.

[Veronica] The shadows of the moon inspired the dark gray blue color.

I thought it was terrific.

I was a fan from the start.

Now, I'm not gonna say that I liked it more than his other work.

It was a radical departure.

But what I liked was its directness, its simplicity, and de force.

So if you look at George's early dogs, they're powerful and they're intimate.

They're strong.

Some people say he was barking up the wrong tree.

I don't think so.

[ethereal music] [Wendy] Fast forward four years to 1988.

George has an exhibition at the Upstairs Gallery in Beverly Hills, California.

[George] I had a show in LA.

And I brought all my Cajun paintings and the Loup-garou paintings, which was about five of them.

I overheard people calling it the Blue Dog.

And he'd never heard those two words put together before.

[Wendy] He gets back from the exhibition to Lafayette, and he's thinking about that.

And he gets up, and he goes to his easel, and he paints this giant dog on a seven-foot canvas.

And he calls it Loup-garou.

He gives it yellow eyes.

And it's in thick, goopy oil, and it's wild.

And it's the first painting in 25 years that he has painted without a landscape in it.

[streetcar bell dinging] [Jacques] So when he came back from the show in LA, we had just opened our gallery here in New Orleans' French Quarter.

And he decided that, for the Super Bowl, which is in town this year, "I'm gonna fill my gallery "with nothing but blue dog paintings, and call it the Blue Dog for the first time."

Every news organization was in town, looking for stories, and it just took off like a rocket ship.

[Reporter] It's a veritable Blue Dog empire.

[Reporter 2] By an artist who has created a new dimension for man's best friend.

[Interviewer] George, can you talk a little bit about your background and your influences in art, and how you got to where you are today?

Well, I'm from New Iberia, Louisiana.

And I grew up there, went to high school there, went to grammar school there.

And in the third grade, I got polio.

[Wendy] And he lost the use of his legs.

Obviously, he couldn't go to school and it was highly contagious, so no one could come over.

[Dickie] I go over to George's house to play one day.

His mother came to the door, saying, "George can't play today.

He came down with polio."

Well, I was devastated because not only was he a good friend, in those days, you had the iron lung or you were dead.

[George] That whole year, I couldn't walk.

And I stayed in bed, and my mother brought some clay.

And I started modeling with clay, and I started making different animals.

And from modeling with clay, I picked up drawing.

[Wendy] George's mama went down to the little store on Main Street.

She had a friend who worked there, in New Iberia.

And she was explaining this problem about George being so bored.

And the friend said, "Over there in the corner.

Try that.

We just got in those art supplies."

And George's mama says, "Art supplies?

George doesn't like art."

George didn't know art.

[George] And my mother bought me a paint by numbers set.

And I started painting.

But I didn't like the painting between the lines.

[Jacques] The most popular paint by numbers set then was The Last Supper.

And he, of course, did not have any interest in painting The Last Supper.

So I turned the canvas over and I painted pictures on the backside of the paint by numbers set.

[Wendy] The first painting that George Rodrigue, who painted thousands of paintings, who hangs in museums around the world, the first painting he ever saw by anybody in his life was his own.

I actually met him attending Catholic High School in New Iberia when they first opened.

It was 1958.

Coach Blanco taught us civics.

He was the football coach.

And he was the husband of our late governor, Kathleen Blanco.

George would doodle, and Coach Blanco would throw him out of the class.

He'd say, "Stand up, George," and George would stand up, he said, "How many times have I told you that you're not gonna amount to anything, drawing?"

[Veronica] We dated for five years.

He was my first love, for sure.

Put the hand on the scarf.

Only one hand.

[Veronica] I realized his artistic bent when I asked him to do posters for me when I ran for student council of my high school.

George went to several semesters at the University of Louisiana here in Lafayette.

And he got accepted into the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles.

He packed up his car, he got on Route 66, never been west of Texas before, and drove to LA and landed there with no place to live and no money.

[Veronica] It's the smartest thing he ever did because he had teachers who were part of the real art world and advertising world.

[Jacques] His classmates, his friends, were like, "You're from Louisiana?"

They never heard the word "Cajun".

For him, it was surely a culture shock.

And he began to realize, "Wait a minute.

The whole world isn't Cajun."

[Wendy] It's interesting 'cause with all the things going on in the world, and Los Angeles especially, particularly protests for the Vietnam War going on, George was unaffected by all of this.

He was on a mission.

However, one thing that did really affect him that was going on in California at the time was a gallery called the Ferris Gallery.

[George] This was in the late '60s.

I was out in California when Andy Warhol had his first exhibit there.

So I knew something new was going on.

The professors and teachers, George said, dismissed it.

They just thought it was a joke.

But the students were fascinated by it.

This idea of repetitive imagery and hard edges.

Very bright, strong colors, contrasts.

[William] When you have a ubiquitous image that is reproduced so consistently, of course, comparisons are going to be made.

So George's classmates at ArtCenter College of Design went to New York.

And George did for a short time.

But it wasn't for him.

And then the situation happened with his father.

[Dickie] His father was 65 when he died.

He became ill when George was in school in Los Angeles.

[Wendy] So he had to go home.

But he also made the decision to stay home and to be an artist there.

And it was really brave.

[Jacques] So when he came back in the late 1960s to Louisiana, he wanted to capture what he felt was his dying culture.

Before Dad started painting the Cajuns in South Louisiana, most of it was done by European painters who were used to more of a bird's eye view with a big, big sky.

[Wendy] He starts to get the ideas on his drives home from California to Louisiana.

[Dickie] He noticed something different coming back.

All out west, the big open sky.

[Wendy] And the way George described it, the big skies of Texas become small in Louisiana because, Louisiana, we're looking at the sky from beneath our magnificent oak trees.

There was this pop-art movement going on.

And I came here with knowledge of all that going on and trying to paint oak trees.

[Wendy] So he chose the oak tree, if you will, as his Campbell's Soup Can.

To me, it was just a graphic design.

It was a abstract painting.

Then it got serious, and that's when I started, "This is what I'm gonna do for a living."

[James] It all goes back to Evangeline .

There are substantial critics that think that Evangeline is the best American poem ever.

But it's the Evangeline Oak.

It's so culturally significant to this part of the world.

This is the legendary Evangeline Oak, immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem about Evangeline and Gabriel, who lost each other in Le Grand Derangement.

And George painted that throughout his life.

He first started painting it with a model in Lafayette, Louisiana named Diane Bernard.

George was not a plein air painter.

He would just take photographs and paint from the photographs.

We would come out here and take maybe 100 or 200 pictures, and I'd go to his house and he'd say, "Oh, look, I just painted you."

And he'd have some beautiful piece of art.

I thought George was a genius, just nobody captured any of the art in Louisiana the way George did with the oak trees and the Cajun people and the culture.

The oak tree itself, in all of Dad's paintings, it represented so many things.

It was where the Cajuns found shelter, where they lived, where they escaped the humidity and the heat.

But it also represented the barriers that kept them isolated from the rest of the world.

[accordion music] The Cajun culture has always been on the brink.

They were run out of Nova Scotia, Arcadia.

Because they were expelled by the British.

[Clancy] Most of them made their way to Louisiana probably because they heard people there speak French.

It was a French colony.

They felt they would be more at home.

And when they landed here, the French aristocracy, they were thinking, "Who are these poor, illiterate fishermen and farmers?"

So they said, "Why don't y'all go take that land over there, west of us?"

It was a struggle.

It was hard.

[George] That was the rawest land.

That was a land which no one had developed.

It was the swamps.

So these people came here and struggled for 50 years.

They tried to cut our lifeblood.

But in human tragedy, sometimes something unique and beautiful is created.

And the fact that they brought what they were all about to Southern Louisiana, but then, because of the land, the bayous of Southern Louisiana, this culture gets born.

It's French.

It's Louisiana.

It's a little Native American.

It has African influences in it.

And this is what makes it a culture worth protecting and recognizing.

[Veronica] We married in 1967.

And he was painting landscapes at the time.

And I loved it.

[Jacques] He had a show in Baton Rouge.

And it was about 50 paintings, all these very dark landscapes.

[Wendy] And he brings them to the Louisiana State Museum and he installs the whole show himself.

And the guy calls him and says that a reporter is gonna be coming from the Baton Rouge Advocate to review the show.

George is very excited because he has never been reviewed before.

He opened up the newspaper the next day, and right there was a headline, "Painter Makes Bayou Country Dreary, Monotonous Place."

[Wendy] And as George said, "It just got worse from there."

"His paintings are flat and drab "rather than teeming with life.

"His Bayou Country is a shadowy, depressing place "with none of the life and color that pulses there.

"One feels that the artist takes Acadiana "much too seriously and perhaps himself as well."

He was more determined than ever, and he was mad that she didn't see what he was trying to do.

I think, early on, he realized no press is bad press 'cause you're being talked about.

[Veronica] That ultimately worked in his favor.

Everybody at his first show in Baton Rouge flocked to see what those ugly paintings were.

[Jacques] He sold out the entire show, had more money in his pocket that he had ever had in his whole life, and learned a very important lesson-- to not listen to critics.

[Veronica] That eventually led to painting the people in a primitive, pasted-on look because they were exiled here.

[Emeril] And people had a hard time-- some people had a hard time understanding that.

Like, "Where is this guy coming from?"

And then, once you understood it, and you really got to understand him, then the whole thing connected.

And the whole thing connected to George.

The whole thing connected to his artwork.

The whole thing connected to Louisiana.

And the whole thing connected to his family.

After the landscape show, he comes back to his easel and decides it's time to paint the people of South Louisiana.

[William] It was, in a way, making a documentary on canvas of what was happening to the Cajun culture before it completely disappeared.

[country music] And he started with an old photograph that he had of his grandfather and a bunch of their friends who called themselves a Gourmet Society.

[William] The Aioli Dinner is an incredibly pivotal painting for George Rodrigue.

It was painted in 1971.

And the artist said, at one time, he finally confronted the idea of painting people in this landscape when he felt like, "I wonder what it would look like if someone stepped out from behind one of my trees."

At the time that that work was made, people were not used to seeing those aspects of Cajun culture.

[George] We had different food, we had different music.

There was nobody to record the last 200 years why we were here.

[James M.] It's probably a great example of the qualities in George's work that I admire the most.

And that is that it's very simple, it's almost brutal.

You see the elemental quality and, also, you get a feeling for the struggle of Cajun life.

There's all these wine bottles on the table.

And that would say, "Ah, yes, frivolity."

Yeah.

Maybe so, but, for me, also, it's a little bit reminiscent of the wine bottle in Picasso's Blue Period on the table.

And the idea of wine as a nourishment rather than celebration and intoxication.

He never sold it.

And I think that's one of the most important aspects about this painting.

I think he probably knew it was unsellable or should not ever be sold because he certainly priced it among the highest of the paintings that he ever created.

[accordion music] What you got here, Catherine?

Okay, Wendy.

This is Grandfather Jean Courrege's actual bowl and pestle that he used to make his own aioli.

-[Wendy] No way.

-[Catherine] Yes.

Yeah.

And feel how smooth it is.

So I like this, that the women did the cooking in the back, but the men cooked the aioli.

Which is just garlic-flavored mayonnaise.

George told me he chose the Darby House as the setting because it was still standing when he did the painting in 1971.

For his grandfather's face, it took him three days just to paint his face.

Can you imagine?

Each one of these is a portrait.

George said he never painted the same way again.

This is how he developed his style.

And this is when he came up with the idea too to lock them into the land.

[George] That's why they not in shadows.

Yet they are sitting underneath a dark oak tree.

But the people glow in the light of the landscape came from way far away, and it represented the hope of the Cajun.

It's not reality.

It's more of the hope of a culture trying to survive in the new world.

People don't understand our culture the way that we do.

You wanna preserve it.

You want it to be there for your children, your grandchildren.

[Clancy] When the rest of Louisiana started intruding, it presented lots of opportunity, but it came at a price.

There was an official government push to effectively destroy the Cajun culture, and George had paintings that illustrated this.

It shows that, in the 1950s, the school system didn't want the students to speak French.

They had to go to live in the swamps.

They were not allowed in New Orleans.

They were not allowed in the populated areas.

This is what I wanted to show, the pain, the suffering, of all these people.

[Wendy] George's mama was not happy at all when George called himself a Cajun artist.

She thought of the Cajuns as ignorant.

If you told my grandmother she was a Cajun, she may slap you.

It was a derogatory term.

[Veronica] George's mother's father came directly from France.

So she considered herself French, not Cajun.

[Jacques] But for Dad's generation, it was something to be celebrated.

And then he really credits Chef Paul Prudhomme with putting the word "Cajun" on the map.

We doing something from Basile.

Basile is a little bitty town in Central Louisiana, where I was born at.

And it's a Basile barbecue brisket, man.

It's the four B's.

Yeah, baby!

[Jacques] He had his cooking show.

He had his black and red fish.

And everyone in the country was obsessed with Paul's Cajun food.

And so, when they first met, they just were kindred spirits.

They were friends, and they just gave a cultural boost to our region.

[Randy] George just loved Louisianians being successful.

James Carville is an example.

James appeared in several of George's paintings over the years.

Sports and politics is equal as a pastime in Louisiana.

So George also started to paint Louisiana governors because they were Cajuns and they were individuals who were successful.

He was quite perceptive about painting famous people, particularly politicians.

That got wide coverage.

[Jacques] In the late 1980s, Dad was commissioned to paint a portrait of President Ronald Reagan.

And the Republican Party wanted Reagan to be on a horse.

I think they actually just sent photos of Reagan on his horse.

Reagan was on this really old horse, just with the head drooping down.

[Veronica] So George found a photograph of Gene Autry on his horse that looked the right way that he wanted to paint.

So he put Reagan's head on Gene Autry and [laughing] that's the portrait.

[Jacques] In the mid-'80s, we knew Dad had become all but the official Louisiana artist.

He was doing books.

He was illustrating festival posters.

News crews from all over the country were coming in.

Cajun country, that's where you get a bottle of hot sauce at the restaurant without having to ask for it.

And the man who is gonna lead our little tour of this part of Louisiana is the Cajun artist George Rodrigue.

[George] Everything is shades of gray and black and dark.

Back in the swamps, the skies are real small.

[André] He was always painting, always painting, always painting.

That's my memory of him, basically.

During every night, he was upstairs, painting.

-You like it?

Yeah?

-[André] Mm-hmm.

[André] All right, Dad, I'm gonna go play.

Okay.

[André] Whenever I would come up here, it was a slight Wonderland because there would always be a new image that he was working on right there on the easel.

And I was always fascinated by the palette with all the paints, all the different mixtures that he was putting together for shading and whatnot.

This was where every painting of the Cajun series was painted.

Just one man in his chair, making these paintings, and doing the Cajuns, setting up the projector over here, lighting it, sketching out the figures and then creating whatever he wanted to do.

I remember when he had started doing all the paintings for the Bayou book, the one with all the ghost stories in it, and then when he was painting Tiffany as the Loup-garou, it was frightening to me because it looked so different from her actual fur color.

He painted the eyes intentionally to be frightening.

And it worked on me.

[Shemsi] When you look at the Blue Dog today, it looks very different.

And so, for Rodrigue, hearing the dog called the Blue Dog instead of the Loup-garou opened up all of these possibilities.

[George] So I dropped all the Cajun influence.

I dropped the oak tree.

I dropped everything with the painting, and it changed in my mind, what was the Blue Dog?

What was it about?

His being open to this idea created this whole other second act in his career.

[Jacques] He realized that, "This could be "the new graphic design element "that could break up every canvas I paint from now on."

He treated it like one of his Cajuns, like one of his oak trees.

Bridget O'Brian worked and wrote for The Wall Street Journal .

And she contacted George and wanted to do an article on him.

It was a front-page column.

And it even had a drawing of the dog right there.

And it was called, "How Many Dogs Can Fetch Money?"

I began my first term as mayor in early 1994.

And it was an exciting time for arts and culture in New Orleans.

You had George Rodrigue, but you had the Marsalis brothers, Wynton and Branford being, if you will, the embodiment of the redefinition of jazz.

You had Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Leah Chase, and many, many others who became internationally recognized for their New Orleans creations.

So George Rodrigue, with the Blue Dog, created an iconic brand of something so identifiable with New Orleans, with its culture, and with its uniqueness.

[John] It's interesting how one image can get lodged in the public imagination to such an extent that, even if you have no interest in art or no knowledge, you immediately know, "Oh, that's the Mona Lisa," or, that's American Gothic.

And I think George's The Blue Dog had achieved that kind of iconic status.

[George] When I look at a painting, I gotta paint a blue dog.

I don't go back and look and see what I've done.

I try to do something that's never done before.

And it's exciting to me.

[strings music] Watching George painting early and then seeing the gallery in New Orleans become more and more famous, and opening up a gallery in Carmel, and having one in Germany, and then having one in Japan, it was tremendous being part of that.

[Jacques] So now that The Blue Dog is a series that he is painting, he starts getting attention from major brands like Absolut Vodka and Xerox Corporation and Neiman Marcus.

And he starts being commissioned to illustrate these ad campaigns, which go across the country and worldwide.

[applause] [Wendy] That's when it went from people walking in, saying, "What's with this dog?"

to people walking in, saying, "I know that dog."

[Jacques] Celebrities started to collect.

There was more and more portraits of famous people.

Arnold Schwarzenegger came into the gallery one day and, also, Sylvester Stallone.

That was pretty neat, meeting both of those guys.

He did a painting of me one time.

It was really great.

I still have it.

I turned into a big fan as well.

There was just something about George, this very unique spirit about him.

It was infectious.

In 1996, the Democratic National Committee approached George Rodrigue to make the official inaugural portrait for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

This presidential portrait showed them walking into the 21st Century.

The photograph he was using was the two of them walking off of Air Force One.

As Dad would get commissions like the Clinton Presidential Portrait, the people commissioning it wanted a blue dog in it.

He didn't feel like it belonged.

The blue dog is not a little thing down at our feet.

It is in your face.

It is something else.

The president insisted.

[James] When I saw it, I was not surprised because I knew what affection President Clinton and Vice President Gore had for this state and its culture.

[John] George was a wonderful promoter of his own art.

He valued it.

In the very beginning, he would paint a bunch of paintings, and put them in the trunk of his car, and drive around South Louisiana, and sell them right out of his trunk.

He would hang his paintings in restaurants and bank lobbies.

Partly it was because he couldn't get museums to do a show of his, or galleries.

The Blue Dog was something very iconic and different that a lot of people didn't believe in.

But he believed in himself and he, for every no he got, he wanted to work that much harder and prove to people that he could do it.

[Emeril] There were a lot of critical people in the art world, in the art culture, that were like, "What is this guy?"

He proved them all wrong.

[John] Those kind of people think that if an artist is incredibly popular, there must be something wrong.

[George] "You're a genius at marketing."

No, if I'm a genius, I'm a genius at painting.

Because the paintings, you can't market trash.

You can, but it's still trash.

His willingness to succeed, his ability to market himself and to be a artist who was not struggling... you know, it's a cliché, it's so often true.

And George set aside all of that and was willing to be an unabashed success.

I think he was a great example for a lot of people for that reason.

[Don] I really have never had the opportunity to meet anyone like George.

He made a huge impact on this city.

He made a huge impact on the art world.

He made a huge impact on me.

I think a lot of people don't realize how versatile he was.

I find it fascinating to see a progression of one theme.

Jolie Blonde, for instance.

You look at the early Jolie Blondes, and they're fantastic.

[George] Jolie Blonde is a song.

It was a famous Cajun song.

It was written by a prisoner in a jail in Port Arthur, Texas.

The first Jolie Blonde painting got exhibited in France and won a big award.

[Clancy] He had an exhibit in Paris that was very well received.

And Le Fig , one of the stalwart publications in Paris and in Europe, described him as Louisiana's Rousseau.

[George] It was a time when Louisiana was really connected with France and I was a Cajun artist, showing all over the world.

I was giving an image to the culture.

And no one had done that at the time before me.

[Dana] To see now as the theme of Jolie goes through his work, to see the later pieces, he did another Jolie Blonde in 2007.

And it's a mixed media.

And he added some vibrant colors.

He added more texture to it.

And it's very abstract, and it's incredible to see those two paintings side-by-side.

Hello.

It's Mardi Gras Day.

[George] Yeah.

George was blessed to have two wives who loved him and supported him.

And each one, in her own way, was a Rock of Gibraltar for George.

For once, I'm not attracting a lot of attention.

[laughter] [Clancy] Wendy was definitely one of George's Jolie Blondes, his favorite one, she was his muse.

And she was, and she still is, such a great booster of George and his work.

He used to say, "We've got all these different types of art."

He said, "It's too much.

In art, the more personal you are, the better you become."

[Henry] George put her on a pedestal all his life.

He did do some great paintings of Wendy and they are in his books.

[Wendy] George and I were to get married on March 1st of 1997.

And he just kept telling me that he was taking care of the invitations.

[Clancy] And their wedding invitation was George in a tuxedo with the Blue Dog as his face, and Wendy, a beautiful blonde in her wedding gown.

George was very romantic.

He made gifts for me all the time.

He was happy in his generosity.

I saw him put people's kids through college.

I saw him give people cars.

[Tony] I didn't know much about art as far as business.

I owe that all to George, the success that I've had.

[Wendy] Tony Bernard started off as a billboard artist, and that's when I met him.

And George was excited to work with Tony on some new billboards.

But more than that, he liked Tony.

And he wanted to encourage him in his own art.

I had dabbled a little bit on canvas.

So I was trying to pick his brain about painting canvases.

I remember this to this day.

He says, "When you go home, you need to paint on canvas," and I told him, I said, "What?

I paint all day.

I'm exhausted."

And he said, "You need to do that "because 20 years from now, if you don't, you'll be exactly where you are."

And before you know it, Tony becomes George's, I don't know, studio assistant, but it was so much more than that.

They became extremely close friends.

[Tony] If I learned anything from him in 20 years, it was to be generous to people.

And not only to the people that you know.

People that you don't know that need it.

[thunderclap] [Reporter 3] This is the scene on Napoleon Avenue, a neighborhood of stately homes flooded to the front door.

Choppers above us, our crew drives until we have to walk.

The water is getting too deep, and it's getting deeper.

We're told there's a hospital about six blocks away, and we're gonna try to make it there.

When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, we were in Houston already, having a Rodrigue exhibition.

So we just stayed.

And watched on television the nightmare we all watched.

It was our home.

We didn't know if our house was flooded or not.

We didn't know if the city would ever come back.

[Clancy] New Orleans was devastated after Katrina.

Eighty percent of the city flooded.

It sucked the life out of the city.

For a long time.

The first thing that we did, of course, was try to take care of our staff.

Some of whom lost everything.

The other thing that we did right away was to get the art out.

And I can remember passing Jacques, again and again, he and I, up and down those stairs, hauling paintings.

For some reason, that really stands out in my mind.

This picture was taken outside of his house.

And we were standing in the street, overwhelmed by the devastation of the city.

George received a copy of the photograph and did this sketch from the photograph.

It says, "Tony.

Thanks for all the help in 2005, the year of Katrina."

[Wendy] I saw George depressed after Katrina.

The suffering was weighing on him.

The suffering of the city he loves.

The people he loves.

[Jacques] And so, for a while, Dad didn't paint at all.

He was unsure of the future.

Katrina just, [clears throat] it hit him pretty hard.

Because the aftermath was arguably worse than the actual event.

And there was a widespread feeling of hopelessness that needed to be overcome.

George stepped up by doing a Blue Dog painting and a signed limited edition silkscreen.

It raised a half-million dollars for the Red Cross very quickly.

[Wendy] We were in Lafayette, Louisiana.

And that is where he painted We Will Rise Again.

But he didn't like it.

It wasn't working right.

He felt that the water looked like marble instead of water, and he really wanted this idea of the dog being submerged.

And so, he went to Tony Bernard's house and he photographed his swimming pool.

The water.

Then he had that photo of the water printed on a big canvas.

And then he started again.

And he painted on top of that.

And that's why it's so effective.

The dog emerging out of the water while also submerged, "We will rise again."

That's when I saw his giving, his compassion for Louisiana.

[Jacques] Dad painted We Will Rise Again and other pieces that were specifically designed to raise funds for Katrina relief.

And the campaign itself raised several million dollars to help the city of New Orleans.

My wife, Brittany, and I, when we first got to New Orleans, we felt that this was a calling.

This was a calling to not just be the quarterback for the football team, but to be part of the rebuilding and the resurgence and the resurrection of one of America's greatest cities.

I do remember, very vividly, it was the 2007 off-season win, I get a call, saying that, "Hey, this legendary artist, George Rodrigue, "wants to paint you alongside Blue Dog."

It didn't take me long to realize what a legend George Rodrigue was and what a legendary story Blue Dog is, and just how it's really become a part of this culture.

It's no secret that Drew Brees and the Saints were part of the city's comeback.

They inspired the city.

They gave us hope.

And Drew Brees was central to that narrative.

So it was a natural for Drew Brees and the Blue Dog to be captured by George.

[Wendy] George was a huge football fan.

He loved the Saints.

You can't imagine.

To be able to meet and paint Drew Brees was like...let me just say, it was way more exciting that the presidents.

[Drew] I remember sitting in the Saints' indoor facility on a stool with my white Saints jersey on.

To see the finished product, the big beautiful oak tree behind, a little bit of this dim lighting and then, of course, Blue Dog right there at my feet, it almost made me feel like I was part of the story.

[Wendy] During most of George's lifetime, we struggled with the museum situation.

But the first big one to happen was actually in 2007.

And that was in Memphis, at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens museum.

[Dana] The first time I met George and Wendy, I was hired by the Dixon Gallery & Gardens to organize and curate a major Rodrigue retrospective.

And it was big enough that the board of directors at the New Orleans Museum of Art paid attention.

Including Mr. John Bullard, the Director.

I was a little reluctant to embrace the Blue Dog.

Which was stupid on my part.

I was coming in from the airport in Paris in a taxi, a little groggy, and I looked out the window, and here was this enormous blue dog on a billboard, advertising Xerox.

And then we drove a little further and then here was another one, and then another one.

I said to the driver, I said, "You know?"

"Oh, yes," [speaking French] Yes.

George Rodrigue."

I said, "Goodness, if a Paris cab driver "knew all about George and the Blue Dog, "then I can't fight its popularity anymore.

I'm going to embrace it."

2008, the city and the museum were still in the throes of recovering from Katrina.

We said, "Look, George, this would be a great time "to do a big exhibit of your work because it would bring people back to the museum."

Working with John Bullard on that show was fantastic.

It's a different space than in Memphis.

So we could do a little bit more there.

[John] The museum was able to work with George and Wendy Rodrigue to assemble the largest retrospective of his career work.

[George] Well, it's unbelievable.

It's really, really unbelievable.

I been painting for 40 years and I've had shows all over the world and nothing's like coming home.

[John] So, of course, we started with his early landscapes.

Those beautiful paintings of oak trees with moss-draped limbs.

And then we moved on to his paintings of Cajun life.

And then, after that, we moved into, of course, the discovery of the Blue Dog.

And then that whole period, really in the '90s, when Blue Dog seemed to be everywhere.

[Wendy] And then the best: portraits.

I don't remember how many there were, but it was a lot.

So you've got people like Chef Paul Prudhomme.

You've got obviously all the presidential portraits.

You've got Huey Long and Earl Long.

You've got Drew Brees.

You've got also family portraits.

You've got beautiful portraits of George's sons.

[Jacques] It gave people a chance to look at the work differently.

You have to see it all in one place.

You have to walk through 100 paintings to understand the evolution and understand it was just one guy.

It was one guy painting these dogs.

And trying to tell a story.

And none of that would've happened without the Cajuns before, and Dad got to feel that appreciation for his work, even as a prophet in your own town, that the town loved you.

He renewed and elevated the city's reputation as one of the great cultural places worldwide.

Only one other exhibition topped that show in the more than 100-year history of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

And that was King Tutankhamen.

[lively jazz music] [Wendy] In 2012, George painted a piano.

You can imagine how difficult and awkward this is.

[André] He had a pain in his back.

And he also, for years, had been talking about a pain in his painting shoulder.

But he thought he had been painting for 40 years, so he just wore his shoulder out.

[Wendy] And at night, he used to come up and he would go like this.

And he'd go, "Wendy, rub my arm."

He'd hold his shoulder.

And finally got him to go to the doctor.

[Jacques] Dad was getting his shoulder checked out.

And they did an MRI here in New Orleans.

And they told him to go see a specialist at Houston.

But after some tests were done, it turns out that there were tumors in his shoulder that had originated because of lung cancer.

[Wendy] George never smoked.

And usually we associate lung cancer with smoking, of course.

But that's not always the case.

There's all kinds of chemicals out there.

And in this case, they thought that it was the paints.

[Jacques] We lived on the first floor.

The gallery was the second floor.

And he painted up here on the third floor.

This was an attic space that was not well ventilated, and he probably painted 1,000 Cajun paintings up here.

Ultimately, we believe the oil paints and spray varnishes that he used up here led to his lung cancer.

[Wendy] When we got the news, George was very calm about it.

And he decided immediately to fight it.

[Randy] George felt he was okay.

He says, "Randy, I'm gonna take the chemotherapy."

And sure enough, it went into remission.

[Jacques] His energy was coming back.

The tumors were shrinking.

Everything was responding well.

And he started telling everyone he was cured.

[Clancy] The first time he beat cancer, he and Wendy called Margot and me, and said, "Come on, we're going out to dinner.

We beat the cancer and we're gonna go celebrate."

And George was wearing this tie.

And I said, "George, I love that tie.

Can I buy one somewhere?"

He said, "No, no, you can have this one."

I've cherished this tie, and I can't wear it without thinking of George.

[Jacques] We disclosed it to the public that the cancer was in remission and under treatment, and everything was looking great.

Until it wasn't great.

[Wendy] In the spring of 2013, George and I were driving to California, and on the way, we stopped in Houston for his PET scan.

[Don] I was in the hospital with Wendy and George.

And the doctor came in.

He said, "I think that we've got most of your back problems.

"I feel good about it.

I've seen the X-rays.

"But looking at all the X-rays of your back, "we've discovered that you have cancer in six different spots."

I left, and I saw George went out after that.

[Wendy] He said, "I don't wanna talk about this cancer stuff anymore, Wendy.

All I wanna do is paint."

So we get to California and he starts painting.

And about that time, George Jones died.

And my George loved George Jones.

Certainly if you're George Rodrigue, you're gonna go out with big statements, your biggest ones.

So he does this painting of the dog on a tombstone.

It's as though, instead of a Cajun walking out from behind the oak tree, in front of it, it is the dog.

But it's not really the dog.

It's wearing a tie, and it is George.

And it is glowing, from the inside out, blue.

Not white.

There's a river, or is it a road?

It doesn't matter.

On that journey, leading back to that light.

And then at the base of the tomb is Jolie Blonde's hat.

My hat.

And in combining the ideas of paying tribute to George Jones and thinking about his own journey, George called it, He Stopped Loving Her Today.

[Tony] And my phone rang.

And before I answered, I knew what it was.

And it was Diane, that worked for him.

When I heard her voice, I told her, "I know what you gonna tell me."

[melancholy music] [Emeril] When George passed, we lost a lot.

We not only lost a great artist.

We lost a great ambassador to the state of Louisiana.

We lost a good human being.

A great husband, father.

[Jacques] And it wasn't really until the pandemic, where things slowed down for me, and I got to really reflect on all of it.

And during that time, I had a son.

Dad would've been the best grandfather ever to him.

[Marc] I really think one of his legacies is his commitment to arts education.

And his ability to deploy and continue that commitment through his foundation.

He was super generous with his time.

He would spend time teaching kids art.

Always paint what you like because, if you like it, you know it better than anyone else.

You don't know the next George Rodrigue that's out there.

[Jacques] He was a rockstar when he would walk in.

He was one of the kids.

[Wendy] We visited schools all over the world together.

And he loved it.

He used to say that to be studied by a child or study with a child is more important than hanging on the walls with the great masters.

George and the dog have traded places.

The blue of the dog has drained into George and he is definitively the Blue Dog Man.

And those eyes that are so strong have faded away.

The best thing about the Blue Dog is that everyone sees something different when they look at it.

[Wendy] The eyes were so vivid and so important in George's Blue Dog paintings, that he always said the eyes are the most important part of the dog.

The eyes are the window to the soul of the dog.

There's an innocence, a sincere innocence, about it that always strikes me.

My favorite thing is when I find they're looking back.

I just feel like I'm looking at home.

I feel joy when I look into the eyes of the Blue Dog.

I loved Tiffany.

Mostly, what I think about is George.

It makes me feel thankful for his contributions.

I see us, me and him, I see my life.

I see my journey.

I don't often stare into the eyes.

I look at the dog itself, because George had these dark, dark eyes.

But I think about George.

Because the Blue Dog is George.

And George is the Blue Dog.

I miss my friend.

[George] You go back 40 years and you say, "This started here with the oak tree."

And there's a line that goes through all those paintings to get to where I am today.

[Jacques] For an artist to be known for two distinct, separate bodies of work is really pretty unprecedented, and it lives in people's homes and in people's hearts.

This is one when George was knocking it out and having fun.

What's incredible about being an artist, right, is that stuff lives on forever.

Yeah, he doesn't go away.

That's like asking, "Is Beethoven dead?"

[Emeril] You'll never meet another human being like George.

He's still painting somewhere.

[Wendy] This dog is saying, "Why am I here?

"And where am I going?

And what does it all mean?"

[George] I painted what I felt inside of me.

The honesty of it is reflected in the painting.

They communicate the richness of this culture which is a part of me.

[singing in Louisiana French] [Female Narrator] This program is made possible by... Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers; Don A. Sanders Family Foundation; Henry and Pat Shane; Haynie Family Foundation; Humana; Eric and Jaclyn Dixon; Lipsey's; Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission; Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities; and the following underwriters-- [music] [music]