After a 12-Year Absence, Alexander Calder’s Mammoth Last Sculpture Finally Returns in Full to Capitol Hill

Calder’s final work, “Mountains and Clouds,” was removed from the Hart Senate Office Building in 2014 over fears about its structural integrity

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

October 1, 2026 12:44 p.m.

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More than a decade after Alexander Calder’s final sculpture was suddenly disassembled and partly removed from its longtime home in the Hart Senate Office Building, the work is at last one step closer to returning in full to Capitol Hill.  

Mountains and Clouds, a 51-foot-tall installation made from painted aluminum sheets, is the famed sculptor’s only work that combines standing pieces (five triangle mountains) with his signature hanging mobile (four oval-ish clouds).

It also represents Calder’s final act as an artist. In 1976, the design was chosen to fill the Senate building’s nine-story atrium; just a few months after the announcement, he spent his last day alive in Washington, D.C., presenting a scaled model of the sculpture to congressional officials and sizing up its future home. By the next morning, Calder had died of a heart attack at age 78.

The artist’s estate approved the posthumous creation of Mountains and Clouds—the only time such permission was granted—and the sculpture was formally dedicated during a ceremony on May 5, 1987. Aside from its significance as one of the artist’s largest pieces (the clouds alone weighed 4,300 pounds), some observers remarked tongue-in-cheek upon its symbolism within a government space.  

“Senators have egos as big as mountains and have their heads in the clouds,” Senator Nicholas F. Brady of New Jersey, who personally fundraised the $650,000 needed to complete its construction, told the New York Times’ Francis X. Clines in 1985. “This is the right work for the right place at the right time. If we don’t get those clouds up soon, they’ll be flying paper airplanes in the atrium.”

For roughly 30 years, the installation’s black landscape stood in powerful contrast against the atrium’s white marble interior. But in 2014, the sculpture’s “clouds” were lowered to the ground without warning, because officials feared for their structural safety in the aftermath of a 2011 earthquake. In 2016, they were removed completely.  

“It was a mutilation of his final masterpiece,” Christian Quilici, an independent consultant, tells the Times’ Olivia Diaz. “They took them down under the cover of night. They didn’t tell anybody. They chopped them up.” 

Slow-moving efforts to stabilize the sculpture were criticized. “With the removal of the clouds that once rotated around its mighty, 51-foot peak, [the sculpture] lost its compositional balance and meaning,” writes Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. 

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Twelve years and $12 million from two private donors later, the clouds have been rebuilt with brand-new sheets of lighter, carbon-fiber composite material. Now, the much-anticipated reunion of these clouds with Calder’s mountain is moving forward. Construction crews gathered last week inside the atrium to begin the reinstallation process, which includes hanging and balancing the clouds and then motorizing them, such that they gently rotate around the mountain peaks. This was originally intended in Calder’s plans, but difficulties during the sculpture’s original installation meant that the clouds had stood still since 1992. Getting them to drift, officials speculate, could take until sometime in November. 

“We’re excited about the progress that has been made so far in this historic restoration and look forward to sharing more soon,” a spokesperson for the Calder Foundation tells Roll Call’s Nina Heller. 

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.