After writing my previous post about Boleslaw Cybis and the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, I was inspired to look a bit further into the ‘world stage’ Exhibitions that he was involved in. There were three such Exhibitions of note. From left to right in these renderings of the Polish Pavilions within each, they were the [...]
(This is a re-posting of my original 2018 post about the Christmas trees made by the Cordey China Company, which I had removed earlier this year along with my other Cordey-only posts. In retrospect, I should have left this one up because I now know, thanks to a very helpful reader, that there is a [...]
Hallowe’en is just around the corner; what better time to present a screamingly garish example of a dual-signed (Cordey and M.B. Cybis) lady bust? Although most Cordey pieces were not exactly shrinking violets when it came to design, I was truly taken aback by the color choices on this one – especially because it is [...]
The Cybis porcelain studio issued two main types of retail sculptures: numbered limited editions which were made in a specified quantity, and un-numbered designs that continued to be produced and offered at the will (or whim) of the studio. Those were termed ‘Open Editions’, and when the studio decided to cease offering a design, it [...]
Any biographical sketch of Boleslaw Cybis will mention his membership in the ‘Brotherhood of Saint Luke' – but what exactly was that? It was the name of a guild of artists and painters, formed in 1925 in Warsaw, Poland. The founder was Tadeusz Pruszkowski who was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in [...]
Some online sellers make a point of mentioning whether a given item is or isn’t being sold with its’ original box/packaging, and/or its COA (certificate of authenticity) if there originally was one. The original Cybis-marked boxes were frankly nothing to write home about, and most buyers didn’t bother to keep them. The COA situation is [...]
A rule of thumb regarding Cybis porcelains production was that – unlike many other studios – they did not physically put the name/title of the design on the piece itself. In fact, until a couple of years ago, I would have gone so far as to say they never did so...until I discovered three designs [...]
Tableware (plates, bowls, cups, etc.) isn’t the type of product one normally associates with Cybis, but during the 1940s – and, to a much lesser extent, the 1980s – there were more such items than you’d probably expect. Let’s take a look at the known Cybis tableware items by genre. Plates In this case, ‘plates’ [...]
After the closure of the studio, the so-called ‘secondary’ market became the only way to buy Cybis porcelains. Truth be told, the majority of pieces have been sold that way for the past two decades; even when the studio had a website, their prices were so much higher than anyone else’s that their percentage of [...]
Because there are relatively few surviving records of the first decade of Cybis porcelain retail items, it’s always exciting when something comes to light that was never mentioned in any of their publications. Invariably, the circa-1950s human figures turn out to be religious subjects: a madonna, a saint, or a Jesus figure. So, when an [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 