Jackie Wullschlager reviews the exhibition International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915-1965 at Tate St Ives, on view through September 28, 2014.

Wullschlager writes that show explore connections between the St. Ives painters whose work engaged with "[l]andscape, light, the lure of the local" and their international contemporaries such as Georges Braque. She notes: "Testing the expressive potential of paint and gesture while retaining reference to the external world… these artists rarely fail to delight. But nor do their canvases achieve that unassailable sense of their own reality as painting, in the way that makes the luminous, weighty abstractions by their European and American counterparts displayed here, including Rothko and Nicholas de Staël, indisputably greater works."