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 [...]
There is a small group of Cybis pieces that depart noticeably from the 'recognizably Cybis' retail design aesthetic. All of them were created during the first half of the 1960s and designed by Laszlo Ispanky. Flight Into Egypt is 13" high and was produced from 1960 to 1970 in white bisque only, an is attached [...]
Almost none of the Cybis birds produced after 1960 resembled the early birds of the 1950s in style, and all of them were created in bisque (matte) porcelain. The sculptures below are sorted by decade according to their introduction year. The Cybis Owls shows those birds in more detail than is mentioned here, and the [...]
The Cybis studio has a long history of bird studies, with a few dating as far back as the 1940s; those are recognizably different from those produced during the 1950s and beyond. The Cybis birds produced during the 1950s show a gradually evolving style mix which coalesced into a permanent and definitive look beginning in [...]
Cybis’ various representations of madonnas (old and newer), other religious figures and popes appear in other posts, but the studio also produced several Old Testament character portraits as well. All were limited editions and are shown below in chronological order by introduction year. The first of these was Moses ‘The Great Lawgiver’. It was an [...]
Turning now from the mythological and Shakespearean genres to a more wide-ranging overview of the literary characters as portrayed by Cybis, we find that quite a few of them are from the medieval era. The bust of Beatrice, from The Inferno, is 12” high overall and a limited edition of 700. Designed by Laszlo Ispanky, [...]
What better way to start a four-part review of the Cybis ‘literature-based’ studies than with their interpretations of Shakespeare’s immortal characters? I shall leave it to my readers to judge whether or not they think that The Bard would be pleased! But first a quick word about the "Portraits in Porcelain" as Cybis categorized them. [...]
The Cybis archive 