Mountain-sized makeover: Hart Senate Building’s Calder sculpture getting newly restored mobile

A mountain-sized sculpture inside the Hart Senate Office Building is getting a major — and moving — cutting-edge upgrade.

Mountains and Clouds , the massive installation by Alexander Calder that fills much of the building’s atrium, is undergoing a restoration effort that will include, for the first time, a mobile that will finally move in the way that the famed artist intended. The restoration project was announced Thursday by the Calder Foundation.

Calder conceived the two-part “aesthetic equilibrium” sculpture shortly before his death in 1976. Mountain and Clouds made its debut inside the Hart building 10 years later.

The 51-foot-high grounded stabile is often viewed as the “mountains” of the sculpture, while the mobile, which spans 75 feet, is known as the “clouds.”

But according to Calder’s eponymous foundation, “due to the limits of engineering technology and available materials at that time,” the mobile component didn’t move how the sculptor originally had envisioned.

The mobile had frozen in place by 1992 before ultimately being deinstalled in 2014.

As part of the $12 million restoration effort, the mobile was rebuilt “employing new, cutting-edge advances in engineering and technology,” the Calder Foundation said.

“This restoration project will allow visitors from across the United States and around the world, as well as the Senators and staffers who work in Hart, to experience Mountains and Clouds as Calder envisioned, with the work’s mobile and stabile in poetic, dynamic dialogue,” a statement said.

The restoration, expected to be completed later this year, was part of a “historic public-private initiative” funded by philanthropists Jon and Kim Shirley, the foundation said, noting that the project “came at no cost to taxpayers.”

“With the mobile’s return, the atrium will once again serve as a living civic space where the public can encounter one of the great achievements of American art,” the nonprofit said.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, many of whom championed the decadelong initiative, hailed the upgrade to the iconic multistory mobile inside Hart.

“Mountains and Clouds is an American work of art that has been a part of the Hart Building for four decades,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said.

“The restoration is a reminder of the importance of preserving the art and history of the U.S. Capitol,” Klobuchar said.

“The Hart Building belongs to the American people, and so does the art within it,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said.

“With the restoration of Mountains and Clouds almost complete, every visitor, whether they’re here for a hearing, a tour, or simply passing through, will get to experience an icon of American art history,” he said.

“The work of Alexander Calder stands tall outside of my offices in both Washington and Chicago. But for too long, half of the story of Mountains and Clouds has been missing,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement. Thanking the Shirleys and the Calder Foundation, he said that “this remarkable sculpture will once again be experienced by the public the way Alexander Calder intended.”

“When I became the chairman of the Rules Committee, my very first request from a colleague was, ‘Can we rehang the clouds?'” former Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said.

“It has taken more than a decade, but the answer is yes,” Blunt said.

Soon, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said, “Americans from across the country traveling to the Senate will be greeted by this masterpiece in all its restored glory.”

“One of our nation’s most significant works of public art has stood incomplete for decades, right here in the U.S. Senate,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said.

“I’m thrilled that the restoration of Alexander Calder’s Mountains and Clouds is moving forward,” King said, “and that the ‘Clouds’ have returned to Hart.”