During the difficult years of the Second World War, a dispirited and struggling Ben Nicholson asked his friend Herbert Read if he could get him a job with the Recording Britain scheme. This was a privately funded project which, aiming to capture a picture of the nation at a time of change, paid artists to paint British landscapes and lifestyles. Read, however, would not recommend Nicholson. His style, he explained, was not sufficiently topographical.

It's easy to see why Read had this reaction. Nicholson may have made a name for himself in the art world, but it was not that of the safe landscapist. Instead, divorcing his first wife Winifred in the early Thirties, he had set up home with Barbara Hepworth and the pair had embarked on a Modernist course. Nicholson became known as the enfant terrible of British culture. His crime? To create a luminous series of all-white abstract reliefs. The art-loving public were appalled. They wanted the conventional watercolours of Russell Flint, not these continental corruptions; the pastels of Laura Knight, not these meaningless follies. Such abstracts - “awful lavatory seats” as his father called them - flew in the face of all that we knew: of Constable's lovely views, of Turner's glowing landscapes.

But did they? Or is it to this very landscape tradition that Nicholson's works are linked? This week a new show, A Continuous Line: Ben Nicholson in England, opens at Abbot Hall in Kendal. It is the second major show of his work this year. But even if you saw the spring exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art it is worth travelling now to Kendal because, where the Scottish show focused on the post-1950s works of his third wife's bequest, the new Kendal show goes back to more exploratory beginnings. Hauling some lesser-known landscapes out of private collections, it puts his abstract works in a context that makes us see them afresh.

Nicholson is now hailed as the high point of British Modernism. And in one sense this show offers a conventional recap of his evolution. As you walk through it, you can follow, decade by decade, the progress from the figurative towards abstraction. A young man, struggling free of the influences of his father, a painter of consummate talent but conservative taste, encounters the revolutionary new trends that were rife on the Continent. He discovers primitive simplicity in the work of Alfred Wallis, the eccentric old marine junk merchant who had taken up painting and covered the walls of his Cornish cottage with pictures of ships painted on lumps of driftwood. Nicholson experiments with this elemental aesthetic, abandoning subject matter, adopting a new geometric language that comes to a climax in the white reliefs of the Thirties. Nicholson has discovered the shapes and layerings that he will play with for the rest of his career, from his painted tonal compositions of the Forties to the still lifes of the Fifties, with which this show closes.

But you have to face it, Nicholson is a derivative artist. It is Matisse and Cézanne, Braque and Picasso that we have to thank. And it is for a spirit beyond formal experiment that we must value their follower. This is the spirit that this show explores. Nicholson's vision, it insists, is deeply embedded in a sense of place. It is appropriate that the exhibition should open in Cumbria, where Nicholson lived with his first wife, before moving in January to St Ives, where the painter became the kingpin of Britain's most famous artistic colony. In between, the show moves to Bexhill-on-Sea, which will not be so evocative because, as you travel through the landscapes of Cumbria and Cornwall, you are surrounded by the views that his work explores.

At first you find them depicted in a fairly straightforward way, as in the bare lyricism of his 1922 Cold Fell and the foggy panoramas of a 1925 view from his home at Banks Head. And then you watch them dissolve into abstraction. It might at first glance seem like a logical progress, but what are those St Ives landscapes doing among the Forties reliefs? Nicholson does not plod a steady developmental path. He flickers between the figurative and the abstract.

Nicholson builds up his compositions just as a figurative painter would. He creates a body of work that captures a sense of place as much as any painting by Turner or Constable. It's just that landscapes, he suggests, are not a matter of descriptive topography. They are about the patterns of colour, texture,tone and light.

The critic John Russell once said that if England were to sink into the sea tomorrow, people would be able to find out what it was like by looking at what Nicholson had made of it. This beautifully considered show suggests that he was right. Filtered through Nicholson's working processes, we can learn to see our native landscapes afresh.

A Continuous Line: Ben Nicholson in England is now at Abbot Hall in Kendal (01539 722464). It will be at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea from October 11 and at Tate St Ives from January 24

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