One of the early posts in the Archive (#26) spotlighted the Flower Bouquet of the United States that was created by Cybis for the 1964 World’s Fair held in New York. This new post expands upon and replaces that one, because of a significant amount of new information recently discovered. The Creation of the Flower [...]
Many of the inquiries I have received during the past five years of the Archive’s online existence have begun with “I have a [name of Cybis sculpture], can you tell me how much it is currently worth?” A very understandable question, and one that I have answered privately via return email because of an agreement [...]
The recent liquidation of the Cybis Studio’s holdings has turned up quite a few surprises but perhaps none so much as a small group of stylized pieces that simply don’t fall into any category previously known. For lack of any better appellation, I’m going to call them the Helmet Heads. This wasn’t actually the first [...]
The recent liquidation of the Cybis studio’s holdings has resulted in some important updates on the ‘identification’ front: One wholly unexpected, one positively perplexing, and another somewhat misleading. A Cybis Gummed Sticker It was common practice for the Cordey items to have a gummed sticker affixed before they went out the studio door; enough lamps [...]
The design number that was assigned to each Cybis porcelain is one of those tiny nuggets of information that once served a useful purpose but is now of value only to research geeks like myself (and possibly others.) Originally, it indicated the genre to which the sculpture belonged and also no doubt simplified the bookkeeping [...]
No, I’m really not pairing the chorus of Eminem’s The Real Slim Shady with a Cybis sculpture... even though there certainly were sufficient iterations to warrant it! Although the studio was never shy about borrowing pieces from one sculpture to help create another (see Body Snatching), this particular madonna bust not only kept popping up [...]
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 [...]
Despite the pieces having been produced in the same studio, it’s usually easy to distinguish Cordey and Cybis from each other by sight; their styles were very different. Most Cordey items were Old World/European/Dresden in flavor, while the first-decade Cybis retail pieces were either religious (most) or animals and birds (some.) They were also marked [...]
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