Unlike several other porcelain studios, such as Boehm and Connoisseur, Cybis never made a butterfly the subject of any of their sculptures. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t fluttering about in some of the Cybis designs, however. The studio utilized two particular butterfly molds, plus four others that were used only once; and there are [...]
One of the most bizarre instances of ‘Cybis-design appropriation’ – and there are quite a few of them shown in the Hall of Shame, by the way – recently came to light unexpectedly. One would typically expect a deliberate Cybis knockoff to have been the product of some fly-by-night (or at least, offshore) company looking [...]
Until recently, if someone had asked me whether Cybis ever produced any porcelain jewelry, I would have answered in the negative. None of their price lists or other publications included any such items, and none appeared on their web site. Several years ago I did come across two small stickpins that were described as “an [...]
Although the vast majority of Cybis porcelains were sold as individual sculptures, the studio did sometimes market certain pieces as having a specific relationship to another. However, the instances of them selling two items as an actual pair were relatively few. The various ‘related’ sculptures are best described as pairs, companions, series and sets. First, [...]
The modern-day (1960 forward) Cybis Studio produced several hundred human studies – bust, torso, or full figure – for retail sale. Approximately 25% of those figures were intended to represent specific personages from either literature or history: e.g., Scarlett from Gone With the Wind, Aphrodite from Greek mythology, Abigail Adams, Cleopatra, Hamlet from Shakespeare, and [...]
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’ will be addressed in a future post, but a particular one recently aroused my detective instincts. The 'New Jersey Collection' first appears on Cybis price lists during the early 1990s. Clearly these pieces were intended to appeal to a local/regional customer base. I have found no [...]
For the past several months I've been 'digging' into an unusual story, trying to separate fact from fiction. This particular investigative endeavor involves a set of Cybis' North American Indians sculptures. The story begins in the early 1970s, most likely 1972 or 1973. Several newspaper articles about the Cybis studio mentioned that a set of [...]
The Cybis archive 