January 2023 update: If you are looking for actual numbers to determine the current market value of a limited-edition Cybis, the Recent Selling Prices page will be more helpful to you. However, if you are trying to determine the value of a non-limited piece, the post you are now reading may give you the insight [...]
Category: Useful Topics
Stylized ‘Helmet Heads’ – by Cybis??
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 [...]
Old Cybis Signatures on New Pieces, New Signatures on Old Pieces, and A Cybis Sticker Discovered
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 [...]
List of All Known Cybis Porcelain Design Numbers
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 [...]
Will the Real Cybis Madonna Queen of Angels Please Stand Up?
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 [...]
Double Trouble: Dual-Signature Cordey/Cybis Porcelains
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 [...]
Base Behavior at Cybis
Fear not: This is neither a juicy scandal nor a moralistic lecture. It’s an overview of all the Cybis retail sculptures ever produced on or with a base, and there’s a more interesting variety of them than one would think. All Cybis bases fall into one of two categories: either physically attached to the sculpture [...]
Can’t Find Your Cybis in The Archive? Here’s a Cheat Sheet.
Are you trying to identify a Cybis porcelain whose name is unknown to you? Here are a few helpful tips for locating it within this website. Human Figures As of March 2021, there is a Visual Index for the identification of human figures and busts. However, it's important to read the introductory paragraph before you [...]
Identifying Unsigned 1950s Cybis Porcelains
The first decade of the Cybis porcelain 'brand' existence was a bit of a Wild West show, to say the least. Unlike subsequent decades which came under Marylin Chorlton's ownership, most of the 1950s pieces are both a blessing and a curse to collectors. A curse because almost all of them were cast from commercially [...]
More Cybis Q and A (sort of)
As a lighthearted (read: not to be taken seriously) followup to my recent Twenty Questions About Cybis post, here are some questions posed by a creative friend/Archive reader/collector in a humorous vein, and my responses likewise. Why was Aunt Pauline so foolish as to have ever paid so much for these things in the first place, [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 