An interesting characteristic of quite a few Cybis porcelains, especially those that were introduced during the 1950s and 1960s, was the option to purchase them either as white bisque or ‘color’, meaning hand-painted bisque. Before taking a look at how the white versions compared to their decorated counterparts, I should explain that “white bisque” means [...]
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 [...]
Now that we’ve finished butterfly-catching, why not do some ‘crown-collecting’? Cybis used a crown in 41 different sculptures, plus one honorable-mention piece – but, somewhat surprisingly, only 16 of those items were depictions of royal persons. We can divide the crowned Cybis sculptures into five categories: male royalty, female royalty (more or less), ballet studies, [...]
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. Only two known Cybis sculptures were modeled after a currently-living person (Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine, 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’ is addressed in a separate post, but a particular one recently aroused my detective instincts. The 'New Jersey Collection' seems to have appeared in 1992, possibly in connection with a local centennial although it's unclear which one. These pieces were obviously intended to appeal to a [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 