Peter Golfinopoulos is an American artist. His paintings are marked by a variety of highly individualistic modes.

Life and education

Served for three years in the U.S. Air Force.

Art Students League of New York The Art Students League of New York is an art school at 215 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Although artists may stu ...

, 1950–1951. Studied with

Edwin Dickinson Edwin Walter Dickinson (October 11, 1891 – December 2, 1978) was an American painter and draftsman best known for psychologically charged self-portraits, quickly painted landscapes, which he called ''premier coups'', and large, hauntingly enigma ...

and

George Grosz George Grosz (; born Georg Ehrenfried Groß; July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objec ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, BFA (1956) and MFA (1958). Golfinopoulos’s main interests were philosophy and art history. He pursued graduate work in philosophy with

Robert Denoon Cumming Robert Denoon Cumming (October 27, 1916 – 25 August 2004) was a Canadian-American philosopher and historian of twentieth-century Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology. He taught at Columbia University from 1948 to 1985, when he retired ...

and

Albert Hofstadter Albert Hofstadter (March 28, 1910 – January 26, 1989) was an American philosopher. Life and career Hofstadter taught at Columbia University (1950–67), the University of California at Santa Cruz (1968–75) and the New School for Social ...

and studied extensively with art historian

Meyer Schapiro Meyer Schapiro (23 September 1904 – 3 March 1996) was a Lithuanian-born American art historian known for developing new art historical methodologies that incorporated an interdisciplinary approach to the study of works of art. An expert on earl ...

. After leaving Columbia, Golfinopoulos remained in contact with Schapiro, and their conversations were influential to his development. After earning his MFA, in 1958, Golfinopoulos had his first one-man show at Collette Roberts’ Grand Central Moderns Gallery,
Archives of American Art, retrieved June 1, 2009 and began teaching part-time at Columbia’s School of Fine Arts. Offered tenure in 1968, feeling that the increase in hours and responsibility would interfere with painting, he decided to leave. Later, he accepted an offer from Stuart Klonis, then head of the Art Students League, to teach one afternoon per week. He maintains this commitment to the present day, seeing it as an ethical imperative. In 1963, Golfinopoulos met Charles Egan of the

Charles Egan Gallery The Charles Egan Gallery opened at 63 East 57th Street (Manhattan) in about 1945, when Charles Egan was in his mid-30s. Egan's artists helped him fix up the gallery: "Isamu Noguchi did the lighting... Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline painted the w ...

, who became his dealer and his friend. In Egan he found someone whose connection to history, and whose understanding and respect for art, made him an ideal guide for a young artist. Through Egan he met art historian H. H. Arnason and art critic Harris Rosenstein, whose aesthetic convictions and ongoing conversations provided additional grounding and moral support. His friendship with Egan continued after the gallery closed in 1972. Married to Anna Urban noted Yoga instructor.

Work

The early paintings, 1958 to 1964, are intimate Cartesian dreams. From 1964 to 1971, involvement with Joycean myth brought imaginative, outgoing, precisely measured, and strikingly large abstract narrative constructions. Still working in the non-representational vocabulary of abstraction, there was a shift in the early 1970s to loose, open, emotionally charged dramatic confrontations. The years 1985 to 1995 produced “Comic Allegories,” a group of non-naturalistic narrative paintings provoked by changing situations in the world. They represent the artist’s only excursion into figuration. “Charms,” completed in 2005, are paintings of sensual order. They mark a break with narrative as a generative impulse and a return to a smaller, more intimate format. The most recent works are colorful speculations in and on idleness.

Museum collections

Hirshhorn Museum The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...

, Washington, D.C. *

Corcoran Gallery The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Overview The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design ...

, Washington, D.C. *

Brooklyn Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple na ...

Columbus Museum of Art The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 1878 as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (its name until 1978), it was the first art museum to register its charter with the state of Ohio. The museum collect ...

, Columbus, Ohio *

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

Ithaca, New York Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named a ...

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art ("The Johnson Museum") is an art museum located on the northwest corner of the Arts Quad on the main campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Its collection includes two windows from Frank Lloyd W ...

*University of Iowa Museum of Art (housed at the

Figge Art Museum The Figge Art Museum is an art museum in Davenport, Iowa. The Figge, as it is commonly known, has an encyclopedic collection and serves as the major art museum for the eastern Iowa and western Illinois region. The Figge works closely with sever ...

) *

Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the ...

Golfinopoulos’s works are in numerous private and corporate collections.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Golfinopolis, Peter 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters Art Students League of New York alumni Art Students League of New York faculty American art educators 1928 births Living people Columbia University School of the Arts alumni 20th-century American male artists