The word ‘variation’, as it applied to Cybis porcelains, could have any of several meanings. It could refer to a single sculpture that was subsequently released, with additional decorative elements, as a new piece with a different name; the ‘warren’ of bunnies is a great example of that. The 1981 bunny Bon-Bon was especially prolific [...]
A feature (or a bug, depending on how you look at it) of the Cybis studio’s advertising strategy was to assign each retail sculpture to a named genre-category which they called a Collection. This approach was not fully adopted until almost two decades after the inception of the Cybis brand, but it would eventually run [...]
This companion article to my Cordey Lamps in Vintage Ads post will look at their human figures and home décor objects. I’ve combined the two genres because most retailer ads contained both; ads showing Cordey lamps usually showed only those. Retailer ads for Cordey items first appeared within a year of the company’s 1942 incorporation. [...]
One of the most elusive Cybis-related publications has been the exhibit catalog of the sculptures that were donated to the Mercer County Community College in June 1975. It is softcover, with a plastic comb/ring binding and un-numbered pages. This publication appeared only on one Cybis price list (Fall 1975) as this item under Publications: Mercer [...]
A fair percentage of the messages I receive through this website begin with ‘I have a damaged Cybis, how can I get it repaired?’ Given the fragile nature of these pieces and the vicissitudes of time, this is not surprising. Before I get into the good, bad, and realistic aspects of my answer to these [...]
This is a companion (or ‘brother’?) post to my 2018 Cybis Bonnet Girls. While compiling this I was surprised to discover that there were almost three times as many males wearing headgear (30) as females (11)! And that is without including any crowned Cybis figures or any of the North American Indians (because I feel [...]
Back in the heyday of art porcelain collecting, most purchasers belonged to one or more of three general categories: (a) They bought whatever sculptures they liked, budget permitting; (b) they focused mainly on certain genres, which the Cybis studio termed ‘Collections’ – more about those in a future post; and/or (c) they made their purchase [...]
Helen Granger Young was one of several freelance sculptors who designed for the Cybis studio during the 1970s. Unlike most of their other designers, Ms. Young’s work for them was limited to a single genre: portraits of Native Americans. She was born in Mimico, Ontario, Canada in either 1922 or 1923, depending on which source [...]
The Cybis archive 