Deepening visions ... Edward Burra at the Pallant House Gallery

Right: if you’re able, you’ve got nearly a month to go and see the retrospective of Edward Burra at the Pallant House gallery in Chichester. It finishes on the 19th of February and, as Rachel Cooke says in this review of the show, it’s drawn from so many collections, public and private, that it’s unlikely to be assembled in one place again for a long while.

Admittedly, there will then be that nice surprise of spotting an artist you like in a crowd of strangers, like finding you’ve a friend in common, and there can be something overwhelming about several rooms of one person’s life work; we went to one on Miro last year and had to skip a couple of rooms or stay there all day. But it’s so exciting to delve deep in the turns and B roads of someone’s ideas, and Burra’s developed in such unexpected ways – from the faces and colours and the atmosphere of story that in his street and café scenes, to his surrealist satire and wild English landscapes, to his spectral motorways, busy with translucent figures.

And if it wasn’t for this retrospective, I would never have noticed Burra’s name, never recognised that the men in zoot suits and the café crowd (recognisable from several Penguin Modern Classic book covers) was one and the same with that skull in a soldier’s helmet, the mud-coloured landscape, that they were all united in one slowly deepening vision. I would never have seen the delight in those early ones, the queer pleasure in soldier’s glutes, the celebration of Mae West’s tiny glinting eyes (all eyes in the exhibition are alight somehow, as if signalling some occult possession), I would never have seen those Neo-Romantic landscapes (yes, back to those favourites of mine – and Burra was a friend of Paul Nash’s, as well Conrad Aiken, father of Joan, and George Melly too – very well connected for someone who lived in Rye) which in their blue-grey-green misty superimpositions, resemble more obviously even than those of Graham Sutherland, the covers to those spooky children’s novels of earth magic, Cooper, Garner, Gordon.

Funny that book covers seem relevant, given there’s little evidence in this show that he was involved in illustration. But he did consume all sorts of supposedly lowbrow culture, horror movies and HP Lovecraft and, according to his biography, schlock (I had a look to see if he was a Doctor Who fan, but the only thing anyone is certain he watched was Poldark). I’m sure these cultural cross-currents are much more common than critics like to admit – particularly when it comes to images of the British countryside which, in the 1950s, became less acceptable in modern British art and increasingly utilised in historical drama and Hammer horror. And a taste for genre hokum runs right through the Surrealist lineage back to Magritte and Ernst.

I hope Pallant House has a couple of Burra’s in its own keeping for when I return and have a good rummage round the rest of the place: Steve and I were careful not to dilute our rich, deep draft of Burra with Peter Blake, Duncan Grant, Ivon Hitchens etc It’s an treasure house of strange and beautiful things, and hidden away down a side street away from the shops and cafes. If I was a town planner in Chichester, I’d want to be leading tourists and shoppers astray a bit more, perhaps by gilding the pavement slabs leading from the mundane world to the doorstep of Pallant’s wonderful one. It might take us a while to find it again – but it will be worth it.