It is the kind of story the art world rarely gets: a major sculpture by one of America’s great modernists, lost in a shopping-mall basement for nearly four decades, rediscovered by appraisers, restored and sold to General Motors for a reported $1 million. Months after it went up in GM’s new Detroit headquarters, the tale of Harry Bertoia’s forgotten “clouds” is circulating widely again online, along with questions about how the restoration was done.
From Flint to a basement in Southfield
The J.L. Hudson Company, the Detroit department store chain, commissioned the work from Bertoia in 1970 for the Genesee Valley Mall in Flint, Michigan. It consists of two cloud-like masses of rigid steel wire coated in brass, bronze and copper alloys, together standing about 26 feet tall, and it hung in the mall’s central court for roughly a decade.
When the mall was renovated around 1980, the sculpture was taken down and sent to Northland Center in Southfield, another Hudson’s-anchored mall outside Detroit, for what was meant to be temporary storage. It never went back up. Northland closed in 2015 and was bought by the city of Southfield for $2.4 million. When appraisers went through the building in 2017, they found the Bertoia in the basement, grimy, corroded and missing pieces of steel.
Celia Bertoia, the artist’s daughter, inspected it. The city paid for cleaning and structural repair, carried out by Flatlanders, a Michigan restoration firm, and then sold the piece to GM.
A homecoming at Hudson’s Detroit
GM installed the sculpture in December 2025 in the atrium of its new global headquarters at Hudson’s Detroit, which stands on the site of the flagship store of the company that commissioned it 55 years earlier. To get it inside, crews cut a 75-foot-tall opening in the side of the building and lifted the two modules in with cranes…