The first time I met renowned Japanese art collector Dr. Kurt Gitter was at an Asian art conference in New York in 2001, where he was on a discussion panel on Japanese art. An audience member asked Gitter, "Sir, since you and others have passionately collected antique Japanese works for decades and since a new collector is hard pressed to find fine examples, if you were a new collector in Japanese art today, what would you collect?"
Without hesitation Gitter replied "Easy, that would be contemporary Japanese ceramic art; the variety, quality and cost are there for any collector."
Today Gitter's Japanese ceramic collection is renowned, yet what Gitter had collected for decades before — starting in the early 1960s when he was stationed here as an eye surgeon for the U.S. Air Force — were works he hardly understood cerebrally, yet they touched his senses to the core: Zen hanging scrolls and paintings. As in the the famous koan, he heard "the sound of one hand clapping," and his resulting renowned painting collection is now showing at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art until March 27, before moving on to Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Arts from June 11 to July 24 and finishing at The Museum of Kyoto from Sept. 3 to Oct. 16.