NEW ORLEANS — Dr Kurt Gitter of New Orleans and New York City, a pioneering retinal surgeon and internationally acclaimed collector of Japanese art, passed away March 25, 2026, in New Orleans. His life devoted to family, medicine, and art came to a close at age 89. Kurt’s primary commitment throughout life was to his family. First and foremost, Kurt adored his wife of 40 years, Alice Yelen Gitter; their daughter Manya-Jean; his eldest children from his first marriage, Linda, Greg, Ricky and Douglas; and all 11 of his grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Born in Vienna, Austria, on March 14, 1937, to parents who left everything behind and fled with him to America six months after the March 1938 Anchluss, he escaped the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, an experience that shaped the course of his life and underscored the resilience and determination with which he built his future. His grandparents and the many aunts, uncles and cousins who remained in Europe, were murdered by the Nazi regime.

In 1963, Gitter was drafted by the United States Air Force and stationed as an MD Captain and flight surgeon at Hakata Air Base in Japan. For two years, he and his first wife, Mildred Hyman Gitter, lived with their first three children, Linda, Greg and Ricky, in a traditional home several miles from the base, learning about Japanese culture firsthand. It was there, at age 26, when his lifelong passion for Japanese art and culture began.

He became a distinguished retinal surgeon who devoted more than 50 years to restoring sight and caring for his patients with excellence and innovation. He served as chief of ophthalmology at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans from 1986 to 1996. There, he founded his private practice, Retina Associates of New Orleans, specializing in diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration.

In addition to having a groundbreaking medical career, Gitter became one of the most acclaimed collectors of Japanese Edo period paintings, building over decades one of the most significant private collections of Japanese and self-taught American art in the Western world.

Yukio Lippit, the Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura professor of art and art history at Harvard University, calls Gitter “one of the most impactful collectors and philanthropists in the art world during the postwar period.”

During his military service as a flight surgeon in Japan with his family, Gitter became enamored with Japanese art, culture and people, and began to develop what would become lifelong relationships with leading Japanese art dealers and preeminent scholars who taught him about artists and schools of Japan’s Edo period (1615-1868). Gitter was drawn by what he called the “visual dynamism and immediacy of Zen painting” that, he said, “struck me, much like the bold abstract expressionist action paintings” that he had seen in Greenwich Village. The Japanese largely viewed these paintings in a religious context, but Gitter focused on their aesthetic qualities.

Later, in 2000, the first exhibition of Gitter’s Zenga paintings in Japan (“Zenga—The Return from America”) toured the country and drew significant attention as it encouraged Japanese viewers to understand Zenga as Gitter did: as the imagery of talented painters rather than solely as religious expressions of their Zen faith. The art historian Yamashita Yuji of Meiji Gakuin University credits this exhibition for elevating Zenga’s status in the eyes of the Japanese public. This exhibition eventually led to the designation of a work by a Zenga artist (Hakuin Ekaku) as Important Cultural Property of Japan for the first time.

Guided by expert dealers and his own keen taste, Gitter began to amass a notable collection, parts of which were first exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1976, the first exhibition of its kind to feature Zenga and Nanga genres extensively in the United States, and the first of more than 12 exhibitions of Gitter’s collection held on four continents over the next 50 years.

Following Kurt’s marriage in 1986 to Alice Yelen Gitter, a museum curator, specialist in American self-taught art and educator, the couple continued to broaden their collection to include sculpture, Edo period paintings from the schools of nanga (literati painting), Zenga, Rinpa, Maruyama-Shijō and ukiyo-e, as well as contemporary ceramics. Together, they began to collect self-taught American art as well.

The Gitters lent and donated hundreds of works to museums worldwide, contributed to scholarship, and meaningfully enriched the cultural life of New Orleans, New York and the international arts community. Exhibitions focused on Gitter’s collection have been shown throughout the United States. Zen exhibitions and catalogues containing Gitter’s collection have been produced in Japan, Israel and Australia.

Gitter donated more than 350 Japanese art works to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and facilitated the donations of scores of other gifts from friends, family and colleagues. Since the early 1970s, Kurt had a very close relationship with the NOMA and director emeritus E. John Bullard, who would join the Gitters on trips to Japan to buy artworks. After joining the board of trustees in 1973, he was later named an honorary life trustee in 1991. In 2003, NOMA presented Gitter with the museum’s Isaac Delgado Award for his distinguished lifelong service to the institution and the field. In 2024, NOMA dedicated the Kurt A. Gitter, MD and Alice Yelen Gitter Gallery for Japanese Art in honor of the couple’s transformational impact on the museum and its community. Their donations, both direct and indirect, form the core of NOMA’s Japanese art collection, which had only six paintings prior to his 1972 involvement. NOMA now stewards one of the foremost collections of Edo period Japanese painting in a public collection outside of Japan.

Gitter also donated pieces to the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian (previously the Freer Gallery of Art), where he also served as trustee; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

In 1997, Gitter and his wife Alice founded The Gitter-Yelen Art Study Center in New Orleans. More than 100 scholars, including scores from Japan, have stayed here while studying the Gitter-Yelen collection in depth.

He was honored in June 2025 by the Japan Society with the Japan Society Award for his lifelong and transformative dedication to Japanese art. In 2014, he was recognized with the Distinguished Service Award from the United States-Japan Foundation, an award largely bestowed to diplomats and university leaders.

Gitter is survived by his wife, Alice Yelen Gitter; their daughter, Manya-Jean Gitter; his four eldest children, Linda (Jim), Gregory (Laura), Ricky (Katherine) and Douglas (Cathy); 11 grandchildren, Justin, Jillian, Kaley, Leah, Ben, Chase, Jake, Annie, Joel, Allie and Josh; and four great-grandchildren, Eli, Miles, Millie and Naomi. He is also survived by his sister, Dorothy Gitter Harman of Jerusalem and his beloved niece and nephews, Danna, Oren and Mishy.