Big, Big Congratulations: A friend, curator at the Portland Museum of Art, has pulled a rave review for her latest show from dean of critics Hilton Kramer in the New York Observer.

I have lately been reminded of all this reactionary rejection of modernism by a splendid exhibition called Monet to Matisse, Homer to Hartley: American Masters and Their European Muses, at the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, which brilliantly traces the influence of European modernism on American art in purely artistic terms. Indeed, I doubt if this sometimes touchy and divisive subject has ever before been as scrupulously explored as it is now in this exhibition. From both the European and American perspectives, this show and its catalog are exemplary in every respect . . . The curator of this remarkable exhibition, Carrie Haslett Bodzioney, has brought an unfailing eye, too, to the many other pairings that are the distinctive feature of American Masters and Their European Muses

Whole thing here. Er, Carrie, you do know that Mr. Kramer's a neoconservative, don't you?