Theres half an Alexander Calder sculpture in the Hart Senate Office Building

I thought I’d seen all of the public art in Washington, but until a few weeks ago I’d never seen one of the capital’s biggest sculptures: “Mountains and Clouds,” designed by Alexander Calder and installed in the Hart Senate Office Building in 1986.

It is truly monumental. The titular black, steel mountains rise five stories in the atrium. And the four clouds? Well, we’ll get back to them. For now, let’s just say the clouds are in search of a silver lining.

The Hart Building’s architects, John Carl Warnecke & Associates, included space for artwork in the expansive lobby. Calder won the commission to fill it. His design included a stabile — a stationary work for the floor — and, suspended from the ceiling, one of his signature mobiles, its gentle rotation powered by a motor. It’s the only Calder to include stationary and moving components.

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On Nov. 10, 1976, Calder showed then-Architect of the Capitol George White a maquette of his design. After a few tweaks — Calder used pliers and shears to adjust the metal on his scale model — the work was approved. The artist returned to New York and died the next day.

For a while, it seemed as if “Mountains and Clouds” might die, too. Government bean counters decided the nation couldn’t afford the $750,000 it would cost to build it.

In stepped Nicholas F. Brady, a former senator from New Jersey, and two of his deep-pocketed friends: art collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon and banker and former treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon. They contributed to the sculpture’s construction.

“Mountains and Clouds” isn’t exactly what you expect to see in a government building.

“A lot of people have strong feelings on both sides,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who walks past it on the way to and from his first-floor office. “It is a very bold choice for a government building. But you can take whatever you want from it, whether it reflects the enormity of the responsibilities that we face or the enormity of our challenges. I don’t think it’s wrong to have something of colossal size in a place as serious as this.”

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Unfortunately, half the sculpture is missing. There aren’t any clouds.

Seven years after the sculpture was installed, the clouds stopped moving. The man who fabricated them — Nelson Young of Crystalizations Systems Inc. — was brought back to inspect the assembly.

Young diagnosed a problem with a bearing, an easy fix in his mind. Instead, the Architect of the Capitol’s office decided to turn off the motor, he said. The clouds were lowered in 2014 for a safety analysis and never put back.

On its website, the Architect of the Capitol explains: “Since the structural safety analysis identified the clouds as unsafe for reinstallation due to significant structural defects, the Architect of the Capitol, in consultation with the Calder Foundation, has determined that the best course of action is to refabricate the clouds to the artist’s original intent.”

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Murphy said money for new clouds — lighter clouds — is being raised from private sources with help from the Calder Foundation.

Young is adamant he made the clouds to the artist’s original intent. He’s the one who fabricated the Calder mobile that hangs in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building.

“I built a very strong structure, very safe,” Young said. He points to an incident that occurred when he was inspecting the clouds in the 1990s. While the clouds were being lowered into a yoke, a workman turned a valve too quickly, abruptly dropping the entire sculpture about an inch. The whole Hart Building shook, but the clouds were unharmed.

“I designed and built this thing as an aircraft wing,” Young said. His career has included designing components for the Voyager space probes, the lunar module and a Martian lander.

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When Young hears people say the clouds should be lighter, he says they can’t be any lighter. They were made of thin sheets of aluminum, attached to honeycomb frames with 15,000 rivets. Young says he was given a weight limit of 5,000 pounds. His clouds weighed 4,300.

Young is heartbroken that his clouds were removed. He assumes they were cut apart to get them out of the building. (He assembled them inside the atrium.)

What stings even more is that he says the government threatened him with a lawsuit, claiming that the clouds were still under warranty seven years after their installation and that he should have fixed them free.

I called both the Calder Foundation and the Architect of the Capitol’s office to ask about Young’s contention, but neither returned my calls.

Murphy said he doesn’t know how much new clouds will cost or when they will rise above Calder’s mountains.

He’s sure of one thing, though: “It’s going to be amazing once those clouds are up and moving,” Murphy said. “You’re not going to be able to take your eyes off it.”

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.

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