He pursued graduate work in philosophy with Robert Denoon Cumming and Albert Hofstadter and studied extensively with art historian Meyer Schapiro.
After earning his MFA, in 1958, Golfinopoulos had his first one-man show at Collette Roberts’ Grand Central Moderns Gallery,[3][failed verification] and began teaching part-time at Columbia’s School of Fine Arts.
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.
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.