Last chance to see - Peter Lanyon at Tate St Ives

There are many good reasons for going to Cornwall in the winter: no braying public schoolboys being loudly sick; no endless traffic jams on the hopelessly inadequate roads; no need to book weeks in advance for a seafood restaurant with a TV chef's name as the only thing to recommend it. And this winter there is a very special extra attraction. In the first exhibition devoted to his work in over 40 years, Tate St Ives has mounted a highly intelligent retrospective of the work of the Cornish-born artist Peter Lanyon, who died tragically young after a glider accident in 1964 at the age of only 46.

It was a death that robbed British art of a figure just beginning to forge an entirely new and highly individual abstract art based on his deep love and intense understanding of the mysterious and mystical land we know as Cornwall - so much more than merely a bucket and spade or wetsuit holiday destination.

Despite the remoteness of St Ives, in the thirties and forties it briefly became an internationally influential school very similar to the Barbican school in France almost a century earlier. Remote as west Cornwall was, it was by no means isolated from the mainstreams of modern art, and historically can stand - thanks primarily to Lanyon - as a centre that could rival the much more aggressively marketed New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the fifties and sixties.

Lanyon had the huge advantage of not having been art school trained, although he had examples to follow in the slow-burning primitive work of Alfred Wallis that had so great an effect on Ben Nicholson (from whom Lanyon had lessons) and was strongly influenced by Naum Gabo when he lived in the St Ives area during World War II.

Ultimately he was an abstract expressionist with constructivist undertones which he developed not only in his works on canvas but also in constructions - often in delicate assemblages of found glass held together with Bostick and decorated with strongly painted lines. Towards the end of his life these had developed into highly coloured metal sculptures of 'found' components - an element also of his paintings - which used flotsam and getsum objects, including lengths of garden hose.

But it was the painted gesture and the total confidence with which colours were used that gave Lanyon's work its authority. Bold, sweeping and uncompromisingly powerful, it had the same shockingly electrifying authority as the discordant notes in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. And it was just as irresistible a clarion call to modernity. At his best - and he was just coming to his peak when he died, with clear and vast potential already showing through - Lanyon would have changed painting as radically as that composer transformed music, a potential never fully realised by abstract expressionists in America. Had Lanyon lived, he would have been, along with Moore and Bacon, one of our greatest artists of the twentieth century, as this exhibition (on show until 23 January) makes so clear.

Will somebody now give us a retrospective of Ivan Hitchens, another almost forgotten British artist who, I am sure, will some day also be seen as a major figure in the canon of twentieth century British art? Like Lanyon, he painted entirely in the still undervalued English tradition, 'on the edge', to use Lanyon's telling phrase. The romantic, rich paintings of both men totally captured 'the genius of the place' more excitingly than any eighteenth century painter could ever hope to. Let's hear it for them.

Colin McDowell is an arts and fashion writer and the author of several books including Fashion Today