The Edward Hopper retrospective that was on view in Boston and Washington, D.C., last year and is currently at the Art Institute of Chicago (until May 10) offers a splendid opportunity to experience the artist's masterful technique—in oils, watercolors, and etchings—and his dreamlike scenes of modern life. Nighthawks is his best-known work. This painting, which has been likened to van Gogh's Night Cafe and de Chirico's deserted urban streetscapes, is a reminder of the importance of architecture for Hopper and how much he—a Modernist with a taste for the old as well as the new—has to say on the subject. Here he contrasts the sleek Moderne diner, whose vast plate-glass window appears almost Miesian in its bleak transparency, with the 19^th-century brick row houses in the background.