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 [...]
Category: Useful Cybis Topics
One Cybis Goldfinch, Three Decorative Variations
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 [...]
Cybis Collection Categories (or, Too Much of a Good Thing)
A feature (or a bug, depending on how you look at it) of the Cybis studio’s advertising strategy was to assign each retail sculpture to a named genre-category which they called a Collection. This approach was not fully adopted until almost two decades after the inception of the Cybis brand, but it would eventually run [...]
Repairing Broken Cybis Porcelain: The Good, the Bad, and the Realistic
A fair percentage of the messages I receive through this website begin with ‘I have a damaged Cybis, how can I get it repaired?’ Given the fragile nature of these pieces and the vicissitudes of time, this is not surprising. Before I get into the good, bad, and realistic aspects of my answer to these [...]
Cybis Retailer-Event and Private-Commission Sculptures
Back in the heyday of art porcelain collecting, most purchasers belonged to one or more of three general categories: (a) They bought whatever sculptures they liked, budget permitting; (b) they focused mainly on certain genres, which the Cybis studio termed ‘Collections’ – more about those in a future post; and/or (c) they made their purchase [...]
Cybis Porcelain ‘Artist’s Proofs’: Are They Always What They Seem?
Sometimes you will see a piece of Cybis porcelain with the letters AP or A.P. near the Cybis signature; those initials stand for ‘artist’s proof.’ This term has long been used in the printmaking industry. It originally meant the first (proofing) run of an edition of prints, which the artist/painter would review and make any changes [...]
Visual Index of Cybis Porcelain Human Figures and Busts
If you have not been able to identify a Cybis human-figure sculpture because you do not know its name and thus cannot find it in the Name Index, this page may be able to help. IMPORTANT! BEFORE YOU EXAMINE THE VISUAL INDEX, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING TO MAKE SURE THAT YOUR FIGURE IS NOT SHOWN [...]
Should You Insure Your Cybis?
Occasionally I am asked whether a collection, or a particular example, of Cybis porcelain should be insured. Two decades ago, my answer would have been “yes”; nowadays, it is an equivocal “it depends...” Let’s take a look at the available options using a limited-edition example: the Eagle Dancer. It retailed for $4000 in 1984, and [...]
The Cybis archive 