Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Mary Hambidge (1885–1973): A Vision of Beauty, Symmetry, and Order

133 Mary Hambidge (1885–1973) A Vision of Beauty, Symmetry, and Order Rosemary M. Magee    An ecstatic vision of oneness with nature and the universe informed the work of Mary Crovatt Hambidge. In every part of her life, she sought to find and express the interconnectedness of beauty, symmetry, and order. A weaver of textiles, as well as a thinker and social reformer, these qualities became interwoven in the very texture of her life and work. In 1944, Hambidge established a foundation that subsequently gave birth to the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Nestled in the woods and mountains of North Georgia, the Hambidge Center offers a retreat program where people from many walks of life have found time for solitude, reflection, and creative endeavors. Thus, Hambidge’s grand dream of eternity has had an enduring effect on the lives of artists, writers , scientists, and creative thinkers in Georgia and around the world. Born in Brunswick, Georgia, on December 20, 1885, Mary Crovatt Hambidge came from a family that was part of the southern aristocracy. Her father, Alfred J. Crovatt, originally from Charleston, South Carolina, was a lawyer and judge who served as the mayor of Brunswick. He represented the “New South,” working with both northern and western industrialists; he helped to found the Jekyll Island Club, “whose membership roster carried exclusively millionaire’s names.” Although he was never an official member, he and his family maintained close friendships with some of the members who had cottages on the island. Her older brothers, Alfred Hayne Crovatt and William Cecil Crovatt, both attended Emory University and served in the military. With little interest in the social world of her parents, Mary Crovatt attended Lee School for Girls, a finishing school, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which she fled to New York where she worked as an artist’s model while she Mary Hambidge artist and founder of the Hambidge Art Foundation and the Weavers of Rabun. Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, Ga. Mary Hambidge 135 tried to find work singing. She enrolled in whistling lessons in order to become a professional whistler. Eventually, she found success singing with a trained mockingbird named Jimmy. Demonstrating a rebellious streak throughout her life, she was subsequently described as presenting “a striking figure” with “intense blue eyes and an enigmatic smile, and to the end of her life she was always aware of the impression she made.” While in New York, around 1914, she met Jay Hambidge (1867–1924), an artist and art historian. Nearly twenty years her senior, and already married with children, he worked as an illustrator, often sending Mary drawings enclosed in his love letters. As Mary Hambidge would say, she “lived for years on the verge of extinction until she met Jay Hambidge.” Fulfilling both her creative and romantic yearnings, Jay Hambidge’s scholarly pursuits also strengthened their attraction to one another. Collaborators as well as lovers, they provided mutual financial as well as moral support; his scholarship created a philosophical basis for her life and work while her work elaborated and extended his theories into a whole new realm. They were devoted to each other until his sudden death in 1924, but their relationship continued to inspire Mary Hambidge’s work for the rest of her life. Although Hambidge took his last name and referred to Jay as her husband, no legal record of their marriage exists. As a scholar, Jay Hambidge made a name for himself by developing an important theory of art, which he called “dynamic symmetry.” In a letter dated September 2, 1918, Jay wrote to Mary Hambidge: “I have made a most astonishing discovery and I want you to know about it first. . . . I have solved the whole problem of dynamic symmetry and in the most picturesque way.” Mary took his theories very seriously, not only incorporating them into her life and work but even into her daily routine, seeking to create a way of life that brought dynamic symmetry out of the strict domain of art and into the realm of the spiritual, practical, and ecological. In this way, Mary had a significant effect on Jay’s life and work by transforming dynamic symmetry into an ideology that stretched well beyond the realm of academia.    As an illustrator, Jay Hambidge became convinced that design was not purely instinctive, and he spent much of his life incorporating mathematical equations into design. Out of...