The porcelains that freelance artist Gertrude Fass created for Cybis are only one part of her artistic legacy. Among her other endeavors were wonderful portrait busts in terracotta clay. This material was among the first that humans used to create ‘fired’ objects (as opposed to objects made from natural unfired clay) and the word itself [...]
Although unknown to the Cybis collecting community, Gertrude Fass created some of the studio’s most well-known portrait figures. Mrs. Fass was not only a sculptor, however; she was also a painter and a writer for print, radio, stage and screen. Born Gertrude Joan Kossoff in July 1909 to parents Philip Kossoff and Rachel Gindes, she [...]
We now shift focus from the smallest (smallest limited editions) to the largest: This post identifies the top five sculptors who created the modern-day Cybis porcelains, in terms of how many sculptures they created for the studio (whether or not they were released by Cybis as retail items.) Retail editions that were sold as a [...]
Last year the Museum of American Porcelain Art (MAPA) in Ohio opened a new exhibit featuring a subject that is dear to my heart: The contributions of the vast population of under-appreciated artists and artisans who actually created – on a daily basis – the beautiful porcelain art of past decades. The ‘Hidden Hands’ exhibit [...]
American porcelain art studios tended to offer larger limited-edition quantities than did their counterparts in England: An edition of 100 would be considered typical or average there, whereas here that same quantity was seen as being much more exclusive. Let’s take a look at that upper echelon of Cybis sculptures and see if we can [...]
The Cybis studio was known for their limited-edition human figures, especially the series that was marketed as the ‘Portraits in Porcelain' collection. However, the identity of the artists who actually created (sculpted) them was never publicly revealed. What we regard as the modern Cybis studio began after Marylin Chorlton took over the artistic reins after [...]
After his first year in America (1940), our knowledge of Boleslaw’s paintings and drawings becomes very limited. It is understandable that he would have focused most of his creative energy toward his fledging art studio which was launched in early 1940 at the Steinway Mansion and produced (according to Marylin Chorlton, who was there from [...]
Originally shown in 1930s Drawings, additional material has come to light that absolutely warrants giving this unusual work an Archive post of its own. This was one of the final two commissions that Boleslaw Cybis received and completed before leaving Poland for – of course, unknown to him at that time – his permanent residence [...]
This second part of the chronological retrospective of Boleslaw Cybis’ art focuses on his paintings from the 1930s. I recently discovered that the timeline presented in the early-1970s Cybis in Retrospect exhibit catalog is at sometimes at odds with dates on the paintings themselves. For example, it claims that Cybis was in Italy during 1928 [...]
Because so many original paintings have come to light via auctions during the past two years, I have decided to revamp my original two ‘Cybis paintings’ posts into three new retrospectives according to when they were created: 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Drawings and sketches by Boleslaw Cybis are already chronicled according to decade, and so [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 