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That most, if not all, of Marquis’s works intersect in one way or another with an expanded history of glassmaking quickly set him apart from both his teachers and contemporaries. Enrolling at U.C. Berkeley in 1963, Marquis transitioned from architecture to ceramics before he landed on glass as his discipline. As Tina Oldknow, former Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass, writes, “Unlike ceramics, in 1966 there was little work to look at, and no magazines devoted to contemporary glass, so Marquis went to the library and read about historical glass.” Marvin Lipofsky, a forebearer of the studio glass movement, reflected that “[Marquis] was the first person to really think about researching.”

In 1969, Marquis was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to deepen his studies with master artisans in Venice. He recalls walking into Murano glass factories and standing around, observing, until “someone noticed that I wasn’t supposed to be there.”  After these initial wanderings, Marquis embedded at Venini where, he recalls, it took months for him to be accepted by the glassmakers. Unlike his predecessors and other working glass artists, Marquis eschewed the idea of simply issuing designs for artisans to fabricate; he wanted to learn and practice the techniques himself. Ultimately, it was Marquis’s political ideology that would cement his acceptance, and thus his ability to master Italian techniques: “Marquis won the trust of the workers by sitting with them in an impromptu strike that was called to protest the firing of a glassblower,” writes Oldknow.

What Marquis proceeded to do with his hard-earned experience shook both Italian glass tradition and the world of studio glass

What Marquis proceeded to do with his hard-earned experience shook both Italian glass tradition and the world of studio glass. As an inveterate and resourceful collector, Marquis gathered scraps of red, white, and blue glass from the factory floor, using them to make murrine stars for the American flag, some of which he then used to make pill-shaped sculptures alluding to LSD: the American Acid Capsules. One of these early works is offered here (Lot 138), while other examples are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, a combination that speaks to Marquis’s influence not only in the medium of glass, but art history writ large. Around the same time as the American Acid Capsules, Marquis also devised murrine that spelled out the word “fuck,” which he incorporated into the delightfully confrontational Free Speech Cup. “If I was going to make a murrine word,” Marquis recalled, “the first one obviously had to be ‘fuck.’ The number one word.” (Not limiting himself to the realm of blunt provocation, Marquis would later create murrine of the entire Lord’s Prayer (Lot 134), riffing on both religious iconography and the history of engraving the prayer on the head on of a pin.)

With these early applications and experiments, Marquis had become not only the first American artist to work the Venini floor, but also the first to merge historic techniques with vernacular modes and contemporary cultural concerns. Far from resting on his laurels or taking refuge in a pigeon-hole, Marquis was just getting started; he returned to the United States and proceeded, among other things, to teach widely, establish the production glass enterprise Noble Effort (see Lot 156), and receive an M.A. after presenting his illustrated manuscript on traditional Venetian murrine and decorative canework. In keeping with his populist ideals, Marquis was eager to disseminate his knowledge and skill: “[Marquis] was willing to share information and did not keep secrets,” curator Paul Smith noted, “which was why the whole glass movement escalated so rapidly.”

Marquis’s role in reinvigorating the studio glass movement was distinctly twofold; serving as a proponent of humor and high-low collision, he also championed serious commitment to form and technique as both an artist and teacher. As leader of the glass program at University of Washington, he posted a sign that read “Technique is not so cheap,” a direct rebuttal to glass artist Harvey Littleton. “The mastery of technique,” Oldknow writes, “quickly became a necessary rallying point of the struggling studio glass movement.” Marquis’s influence extended to many of the glass artists also collected by Biallas, including Australian glassmaker Giles Bettison who studied with Marquis.

The many works in this collection evidence Marquis’s ongoing commitment to both history and experimentation, inflected as ever with his own eccentric style.

The many works in this collection evidence Marquis’s ongoing commitment to both history and experimentation, inflected as ever with his own eccentric style. His patchwork teapots make an unexpected aesthetic linkage between Murano glass and the 19th century folk “Crazy Quilt” trend, the stunning Reginald Tower #4 (Lot 145) came from Marquis’s experimentation as a guest artist at the Waterford Crystal Factory; the Marquiscarpas, of course, engage in material dialogue with unrivalled Italian master Carlo Scarpa, who once served as artistic director of Venini. The extensive publication and exhibition history of many of the works from the Biallas collection testify not only to Marquis’s influence, but to Biallas’s commitment to supporting and proliferating the work of the artist and friend she so admired. Collectively, each work fits together like murrine, precious pieces of glass that together reveal Marquis for what he is: a true American original.