The Hart Senate Office Building atrium will be restored to its full splendor after the August recess for the first time in more than a decade: The hanging mobile portion of Alexander Calder’s iconic “Mountains and Clouds” sculpture is returning.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has been seeking a restoration of the suspended “Clouds” portion for nearly a decade, told reporters Thursday that the work will be done next month.
“We just built some new, more structurally sound clouds, and they are going back up,” he told reporters.
The four aluminum clouds weighing a combined two tons were removed following a 2014 seismic safety study conducted after a 2011 earthquake shook Washington and damaged the Washington Monument, National Cathedral and other key landmarks. While they were initially installed as motorized mobiles in 1985, the cloud sculptures had been hanging stationary since the 1990s.
The Calder sculpture has been steeped in drama even before the earthquake. The artist himself died just one day after presenting his model to the Architect of the Capitol in November 1976.
The refabricated clouds will eventually spin, but Murphy is not promising that the motor feature will be ready in September.
“I don’t know if they’ll be spinning in September, but they’re going to be up when everybody comes back” from the August recess, he said.
Murphy stressed that the replacement and reinstallation of the clouds is not coming at taxpayer expense.
“It’s all privately funded,” Murphy said. “I and others helped change the law to allow it to be privately funded.”
Since the clouds were removed, the 51-foot-high steel “Mountains” have sat unadorned — a situation Murphy compared to tearing up a masterpiece.
“That statue is like if the ‘Mona Lisa’ was ripped in half, and you kept it up in the Louvre. That wouldn’t be the ‘Mona Lisa’ anymore. ‘Mountains and Clouds’ is not a Calder sculpture without the clouds,” he said Thursday.
Leo Shane contributed to this report.
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