In 1927, two years after Boleslaw and Marja Cybis married, the couple began to construct a home and studio in Placówka, near Warsaw and the Vistula River. Boleslaw Cybis knew this area from his time in the nearby Kazimierz Dolny in 1924. Some of the art in Cybis Drawings from the 1920s dates from that period.
Boleslaw and Marja intended to create an artists’ colony at their new home. Unfortunately, I could find no record or photographs of the structures themselves, but the couple also created a garden containing stone sculptures. When the couple was unable to return to Poland after the 1939 outbreak of war, family members took care of the estate. It’s not known what happened to it after the end of WWII, but it is related that in 1974 the property was earmarked for the site of a new copper manufacturing facility to be operated by the Werner and Norblin company. This new factory was to be called the Walcownia Metali Warszawa (The Rolling Metal Mill of Warsaw.) Someone recognized the historical value of the garden sculptures, rescued them, and donated them to the National Museum in Warsaw. For the next 35 years, the sculptures were displayed in the Lorentz Courtyard of the museum although that part of the building was not accessible by the public.
In 2010, all of the garden sculptures were transferred to the Museum’s satellite branch at Królikarnia, called the Xawery Dunikowski Museum. It was felt that this was a more appropriate place for the Cybis stoneworks.
I have translated the following information from that museum’s website:
We are currently working on a project of arranging sculptures from the garden of Maria and Boleslaw Cybis. Thanks to cooperation with the Department of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, we hope to gradually make them available to the public. One of the sculptures from this group, Boar by Stanislaw Komaszewski, has been presented in the park for over a dozen years.
This is Komaszewski’s Boar at Królikarnia, originally inside the Cybis garden.
In October 2016 the Museum mounted an exhibition of these sculptures. From their description, translated:
The exhibition presents drawings, maquettes and models…The set of concrete sculptures by Bolesław and Maria Cybis was initially located in their garden in Placówka, in the Warsaw Bielany district. After coming back from a trip to Italy and North Africa that they undertook in 1930 together with Jan Zamoyski, the painter and his wife – pot maker – made for themselves over twenty full-blown works. Their imagination, stimulated by the journey and – in case of Bolesław – combined with his memories from Istanbul, where he worked for three years as a young man (1920‒1923), produced a series of paintings of African women and a series of sculptures, blending together exotic and European motifs: from a well casing decorated with reliefs and stone slabs with floral motifs, to 2-meter high nudes of women with exotic facial features placed against the walls, a ram supporting a mosaic column with a capital ornamented with faces of elf-like girls, and a procession of dancing putti.
The exhibit also included the work of circa-1970s artists Hanna and Gabriel Rechowicz.
When planning the new arrangement of concrete sculptures, we had to deal with their state of conservation. Cracks, grooves and worn-out surfaces are the nightmare of museum professionals, but at the same time they tempt and fascinate the artists. The works by Hanna Rechowicz include a tree trunk struck by lightning, a cracked violin, as well as the deteriorated sculptures of Cybis. Those two approaches must fit within the museum, which is why Jan Strumiłło, in his architectural drawings, has proposed an arrangement for the Cybis’ sculptures that protects their historical matter, at the same time permitting Hanna Rechowicz to orchestrate a romantic ruin intervention through paintings and mosaics. When thinking on the new arrangement of the Cybis sculptures, intriguing cooperation was born, blurring the boundaries of authorship between living and departed artists of different professions: a painter, a potter, creators of mosaics and frescos, and architects.
There is a video tour of the Museum (in Polish) available on their Facebook page. I hope that, in the future, their website will include photos of the sculptures from the former Cybis estate and garden. It is not known whether all of the “more than twenty” sculptures were rescued from the site and donated to the museum.
In the meanwhile, there are a few pieces that have surfaced online photographically. These photos were taken in situ, before the pieces were removed from the garden in the 1970s.
Pair of kneeling figures.
Stone bench with figural arm supports and a corner plinth that resembles the goddess Nike.
Ornate column with ram base. This is the column referenced in the Museum’s description of the 2016 exhibit.
Mother and Son, attributed to Marja Cybis. This shows the African influence.
A Woman or Eastern Goddess, attributed to Marja Cybis. Thanks to the Museum’s text, we know that these examples were about 6 feet tall.
Stone frieze depicting children and dogs, attributed to Marja Cybis.
Although it’s unknown whether this was part of the original 1920s garden, it so closely resembles The Bride (the 1937 oil painting and the 1980 Cybis sculpture) that I must include it! It was offered by the Polish auction house DESA Unicum in October 2020, described as polychrome cement and the provenance being “family holdings.” It is just under 23” high and 18” in diameter. I have dubbed it peasant girl similar to The Polish Bride.
I hope to someday find photographs of the Cybis stone garden sculptures as they exist today. A correspondent in Poland told me recently that he had been to the museum last year and that they were not part of a formal display but instead were simply placed randomly within the park.
Name Index of Cybis Sculptures
Visual Index (for human figures/busts only)
About the Cybis Reference Archive
What is Cybis?
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The Cybis Archive is a continually-updated website that provides the most comprehensive range of information about Cybis within a single source. It is not and never has been part of the Cybis Porcelain studio, which is no longer in business.
The Cybis archive 