No, I’m really not pairing the chorus of Eminem’s The Real Slim Shady with a Cybis sculpture... even though there certainly were sufficient iterations to warrant it! Although the studio was never shy about borrowing pieces from one sculpture to help create another (see Body Snatching), this particular madonna bust not only kept popping up [...]
Collectors of circa-1950s Cybis porcelains know that the pieces produced during that decade differ from those produced in 1960 and beyond in two respects: Almost none were original Cybis designs (see this post), and many of them had a glazed finish. (Later pieces were all originals and were never glazed.) But there’s also a sub-group [...]
A perennial staple of modern (post-1960) Cybis advertising was always that ‘no two [are] exactly alike’ ..... but what does “exactly” mean in this context? (We will step gingerly away from any comparison to responses along the lines of “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.") Seriously, though: When it comes to art [...]
One of the aims of this web site is to eventually catalogue all of the Cybis studio’s designs – a rather daunting prospect when one considers that very few records were kept during their first decade. After Marylin Chorlton took over the studio at the end of the 1950s, things became more organized but their [...]
Although we know that Cybis used molds bought from other companies to produce almost all of their 1950s retail line, their local competitor Boehm seemed to have eschewed this practice – or so I thought until recently, when I found a singing-angel figurine made by both studios during that decade. And they weren’t alone: at [...]
Cybis pieces produced during the 1950s are noticeably different from the post-1960 sculptures in several ways. One is that almost all of them were cast from commercially available molds, a topic more fully explored in When Is a Cybis Not a Cybis. Another is that a fair percentage of 1950s items were fully glazed, rather [...]
The convoluted subject of the various Cybis porcelain ‘collections’ is addressed in a separate post, but a particular one recently aroused my detective instincts. The 'New Jersey Collection' seems to have appeared in 1992, possibly in connection with a local centennial although it's unclear which one. These pieces were obviously intended to appeal to a [...]
The majority of representations of Jesus produced by the Cybis studio date from the 1950s and, as far as we know, those were all cast from molds they purchased from commercial mold companies such as Holland, Atlantic, and others. The Jesus sculptures fall into four categories: busts, full figures, crucifixes, and wall mounted items such [...]
If I were to combine the words ‘Cybis’ and ‘lamp’, you’d probably assume I was referring to a Cordey item....and in most cases you’d be right. The lamps that came out of the Church Street studio were usually Cordeys, but surprisingly there was at least one lamp that emerged with a Cybis signature and entirely [...]
Sculptors, moldmakers, assemblers, and painters were not the only artists who contributed to the success of the Cybis porcelain studio. Print advertising was critical in those pre-Internet decades. Images of Cybis sculptures appeared in two formats: photographs, for use in their catalogs, brochures, and magazine ads; and illustrations, for use in newspapers. Although a photocopy [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 