Let's play Twenty Questions with a potpourri of Q and A about Cybis porcelains. :-) How do you pronounce CYBIS? It is pronounced see-biss. There is a software company by the same name but their name is pronounced sigh-biss, as in "cyber." Will sunlight fade the colors of a Cybis porcelain? No, the colors will [...]
Category: Useful Topics
Cybis Porcelains ‘Before and After’
The transformation from the artist's initial clay model to the finished retail product was something that collectors rarely had a chance to see and appreciate. Shown below are "before and after" photos of a baker's dozen Cybis designs, contrasting their initial (or early) stage with the sculpture that ultimately appeared on the retailer's shelf. Original [...]
Decoding Cybis and Cordey Design and Mold Numbers
The two Boleslaw Cybis porcelain lines (Cordey and Cybis) both utilized a number system for their production but approached them in different ways. A working knowledge of both can be helpful when trying to identify the 1950s output of the Cybis branded items in particular. The Cordey Numbering System Cordey items often contain an embarrassment [...]
The Cybis Court Jester (or, Send In the Clone)
If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then the Court Jester figure by Cybis should be very flattered indeed. One of the most striking lookalike (copycat) clones surely must be the one that was issued by the Milano Porcelain company. But first, the authentic Cybis sculpture: The Court Jester was issued by Cybis [...]
The Hall of Shame (copies of Cybis porcelain)
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when it comes to things like copyright infringement there's such a thing as being a little too flattering! So herewith the Archive inaugurates a Hall of Shame displaying blatant knockoffs of Cybis Porcelain copyrighted designs. There is one item that I dithered over adding to [...]
Edition Size Discrepancies: A Cybis Conundrum
From a collector’s point of view, the issue size of a limited-edition item is of major importance; it’s therefore disconcerting if the artist or manufacturer plays fast and loose with that particular attribute. The concept of marketing retail items as “limited editions” didn’t become widespread until the 1960s. The Boehm Porcelain studio was one of [...]
Upsize, Downsize (or, Honey I Shrunk the Cybis)
Although I’ve never been a fan of Cybis’ Hall of Fame series of replicated “legacy” sculptures, I’ve always been curious about how they managed to produce identical but downscaled versions of pieces whose original molds were supposedly destroyed decades ago. So, I decided to learn how the upsize/downsize process actually works. In my quest to [...]
Color Confusion: Cybis Alternate Colorways
Cybis had differing motivations when it came to doing color variations on certain sculptures, and it can cause considerable confusion when seeing (or selling) them in the secondary market. This is because a color variation may have been done for any one of several purposes. (Note: This article does not apply to the Hall of [...]
Selling Your Cybis (or, Where Do I Go From Here?)
Way way back in the Dark Ages B.E. (Before eBay), there were only two avenues for selling a piece of Cybis porcelain if you weren’t a retailer who was part of the Cybis Studio’s dealer network: You either placed an advertisement in the classified-ads section of a newspaper, or if you had a working relationship [...]
About Prices in the Cybis Reference Archive
I have received many inquiries from people asking for advice on pricing or valuing a piece of Cybis that they have received or wish to sell, and they sometimes asked why there is no indication of the actual current market value in my description of each piece in the Archive. For several years, the simple [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 