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 [...]
During the 1950s, the Cybis studio often used the same bird mold(s) for several different sculpture issues and relied on the painting to ‘identify’ the species intended. Because they never put the name of any piece on the sculpture itself, and a 1950s price list has never been found, this sometimes creates a “fun” game [...]
Every now and then something utterly unexpected from the Cybis studio comes to light, such as the discovery of a very unusual limited edition that was available for a relatively short time. (Some of this content originally appeared as a previous Archive post that described this sculpture as a gallery-exclusive special-event piece. However, official Cybis [...]
It was rather a surprise when I recently realized that between the Cybis and Cordey studio operations, they produced 15 ducks in various designs and iterations from the early 1950s until the end of the 1980s. I honestly hadn’t thought that ducks were that big of a deal at Cybis, but they actually outnumber the [...]
Rather than simply add these to the 1940s Papka post, I felt this find was big enough (dimensionally speaking) to deserve its own page. It's also very difficult to find any color photographs of Boleslaw Cybis' papka pieces because the only publication in which some do appear (the 1971 exhibit catalog Cybis in Retrospect) was [...]
The Cybis porcelain studio produced five remarkably different style genres during the first 30 years of its existence. Three of them belonged to the same decade (1940s) which was also the studio's first. These genres can be loosly grouped as follows: Papka and early porcelain; Cordey/Cybis retail; spatterware reproductions; atypical early 1960s; and post-1950 retail [...]
Almost none of the Cybis birds produced after 1960 resembled the early birds of the 1950s in style, and all of them were created in bisque (matte) porcelain. The sculptures below are sorted by decade according to their introduction year. The Cybis Owls shows those birds in more detail than is mentioned here, and the [...]
The Cybis studio has a long history of bird studies, with a few dating as far back as the 1940s; those are recognizably different from those produced during the 1950s and beyond. The Cybis birds produced during the 1950s show a gradually evolving style mix which coalesced into a permanent and definitive look beginning in [...]
The Cybis archive 