BASEL, Switzerland—The good people of Basel have the entertaining notion that if you're in town for Art Basel, with its dozens of exhibiting galleries, its ten separate components, and the several burgeoning satellite fairs, you might still go wanting for art exhibitions. As a consequence, the city's impressive family of museums has actually extended its hours this week for visitors in need of an additional visual fix—or put another way, for folks who want to look at art without the constant ringing of cash registers in the background.

This year there is a genuinely fascinating line-up in town, and while there is something for every taste—"The Ancient Civilizations of Bulgaria," anyone? "The Most Beautiful Statues of Antiquity?"—I spent today looking at some from ARTINFO’s favorite territories, the postwar and contemporary genres.

Shades of Gray

I started the morning at the Kunstmuseum Basel. From Art Basel it’s a short ride on the No. 2 tram down the hill and over the river. First of all, let me say this: I've been to art museums all over the world, but the rooms on the top floor of the Kunstmuseum, which is where the National Gallery-originated Jasper Johns show "An Allegory of Painting" is currently hanging, are among the ugliest and most dispiriting that I have ever been in. Downstairs there are a couple of airy courtyards, which were full of warm sunshine this morning, but upstairs the little square special-exhibition rooms are ghastly. The walls are painted not quite white, not quite gray, and they are "lit" by overhead translucent glass panels that refract the daylight. It was a beautiful sunny day outside, but the Johns show hangs in a milky off-white gloom. "It's better for the paintings," a guard told me. Well, maybe in conservation terms, but these Johns pictures, particularly the gray ones—and that's most of them in this show—suffer terribly. I have never seen Johns look so vacuous.

On the positive side, there's often something to be discovered in even the worst of circumstances. Maybe this monochrome murk captures something of the 1950s and early '60s coldwater walk-up, Lower East Side existence that we're encouraged to believe generated this work. And the neon letters that illuminate pictures such as Zone (1962) and Field Painting (1963-64) seem really quite shocking, as they obviously did at the time these works were made. In the same vein, Johns' repeated statement of colors's names, "RED, YELLOW, BLUE," in the relatively colorful Land's End (1963) and the utterly gray Periscope (Hart Crane) of the same year (which, let's face it, have come to seem terribly over-familiar over the years) are charged with a new tension between their monochromatic, colored, and "mis"-colored versions.

And while we’re thinking about Johns as an artist of meanings, interpretations, and contradictions, I don't think it's flippant to add that the playfulness of his titles is given a further twist by the Kunstmuseum's decision to translate them into German and French on the wall labels. Good Time Charley works well as Bon Vivant Charley, but does Peinture de champ or Feldgemälde really carry Johns' reference to color-field painting in his title Field Painting? And Flag Above White with Collage (note: not "over white," or "on white") just is not the same as Drapeau sur blanc avec collage. Frustrating as these translations issues can be, they are something to think about while you're trying to ignore how bad the pictures look.

Anarchy Watch

My next port of call—the wonderful Museum Tinguely—couldn't have come as a nicer contrast. It's a longish walk back over the river and out into deep suburbia in a park full of air and birdsong (which has the splendid name of Parc Solitude). The museum is currently hosting a curious and somewhat underwhelming commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the official founding of that uncomfortable group of philosophers, anti-artists, and political activists who called themselves The Situationist International.