It could be a very cloudy month in the Hart atrium

Sen. Chris Murphynever thought he’d see the day when Alexander Calder’s “Mountains and Clouds” sculpture in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building would be complete. 

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But when the Senate returns from August recess, he said Calder’s “clouds” will be there to greet him.

“I felt like I was going to retire from Congress, and this project would not be done. I’ve spent 12 years working on this, so it’s pretty thrilling,” the Connecticut Democrat said. 

After being removed in 2014 for a safety study, Calder’s “clouds” were never replaced. Come August, a set of new, structurally sound clouds will be hung up, according to Murphy.

“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,” said Murphy, who expects to see some kind of “grand unveiling” ceremony with Calder family and donors in the fall. 

Murphy is one of several senators who have been pushing for the comeback. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said the new clouds were loaded onto a truck earlier this week and are making their way to D.C. 

“They’re headed this way, and in August they will be installed to finally complete Alexander Calder’s vision,” King said.

The Calder Foundation said in February that restoration of the clouds would be completed later this year and that private funding had been secured for the project. Reached on Friday, a spokesperson for the foundation said the restoration was on track. The Architect of the Capitol did not respond to requests for comment.

Calder’s original design featured “mountains” rising 51 feet tall with “clouds” rotating in the air above with a motor. 

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But the artist never saw his full vision come to life — he died the day after presenting his model to the Architect of the Capitol on Nov. 10, 1976. Public funds were cut for the project in 1979, and hope started fading until a fundraising campaign, led by former New Jersey Sen. Nicholas F. Brady, allowed the full-size sculpture to be assembled in the mid-1980s. According to the AOC, it cost $650,000 and is an outlier for Calder because the artist didn’t oversee its final stages.

“We really had to go back to the drawing board to try to figure out what Calder designed,” Murphy said. “There’s a lot of thought that Calder would not have made the clouds as heavy as they ended up being made because Calder died before it went up, so normally he would be on site supervising an installation like that, but he was not. Clearly, there were probably mistakes made.” 

Murphy has pressed the issue for years. 

“Is there any chance that before I leave the Senate, or at least before I die, we can get the clouds back up there?” he asked then-acting Architect of the Capitol Joseph DiPietro in 2024 at a Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations hearing.

The restoration will bring hanging scaffolding to the atrium in August as workers assemble pieces of the mobile and work on the ceiling.

The Hart building is also set for broader renovations this year to harden security, which had drawn pushback from senators worried they’d be displaced from their offices for long periods of time.

“Some of it’s already started, but it’s going to be in phases, and those phases are designed to be less disruptive,” Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations ranking member Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said last month in response to concerns about the larger renovation.

The Hart clouds stopped turning in the 1990s, according to The Washington Post, and Murphy said he is unsure if the new clouds will be spinning by September. Nonetheless, he said he’s excited for it to be a “true Calder” again. 

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“‘Mountains and Clouds’ is not a Calder sculpture without the clouds,” he said.