Throughout the Cybis studio’s history, their advertising photos followed a familiar pattern: backgrounds were either solid or shaded color blends, and when they weren’t, ‘props’ had more than enough bokeh to avoid distracting from the porcelain subject. The common denominator was that they were done within the confines of a professional photographer’s studio – with [...]
Although my other profiles in this Archive focus only on people who worked at or for Cybis, I must now, with great sadness, recognize the passing of someone who was instrumental in forging that studio’s success: Ira Jacobson, owner of Brielle Galleries. In many ways, he was an important driving force that helped Cybis to [...]
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 [...]
Until recently, one of the most elusive Cybis-related publications was the exhibit catalog of the sculptures that were donated to the Mercer County Community College in June 1975. I’m happy to say that, thanks to the helpful people at MCCC, I now have an electronic copy of this ‘publication unicorn’! The book is softcover, with [...]
The 1964 World’s Fair, held at Flushing Meadow Park in Queens County, NY, coincided with the first several years of the ‘golden age’ of the Cybis porcelain studio. It was also the first large-scale opportunity for Cybis to be seen by many people who would have otherwise been unaware of the studio’s existence. The Fair [...]
Although most overviews of Cybis porcelains are arranged by sculpture type (genre and/or edition) it can also be interesting to look at them from a production standpoint: i.e., what the studio introduced for retail and when. The list below aims to do just that, arranged by retail introduction year and broken down into limited and [...]
The Cybis studio officially closed its doors on Norman Avenue in Trenton in late 2019, approximately fifty years after first occupying that custom-built structure. However, there had been no actual production activity for at least the preceding decade; the last new-design introduction had been a single piece, the Carousel Reindeer, in late 2008. The property [...]
Any history of Cybis porcelain would be incomplete without delving, at least somewhat, into its predecessor – the Cordey China Company. Cordey production can be divided into two time periods: Cybis-owned and post-Cybis. The Cybis Era Cordey China was incorporated on October 6, 1942 as a Pennsylvania manufacturing company located at 226 West Columbia Avenue [...]
Collectors of circa-1950s Cybis porcelains know that the pieces produced during that decade differ from those produced in 1960 and beyond in two respects: Almost none were original Cybis designs (see this post), and many of them had a glazed finish. (Later pieces were all originals and were never glazed.) But there’s also a sub-group [...]
A perennial staple of modern (post-1960) Cybis advertising was always that ‘no two [are] exactly alike’ ..... but what does “exactly” mean in this context? (We will step gingerly away from any comparison to responses along the lines of “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.") Seriously, though: When it comes to art [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 