If English artist Edward Burra were alive today, he would surely have shunned an invitation to visit Pallant House Gallery’s largest exhibition to date.

He hated the idea his personality might affect the understanding of his pictures and declined invitations sent by his long-term patrons, London’s Lefevre Gallery, to see exhibitions of his work.

“I never tell anybody anything,” he revealed in a rare interview with the Arts Council in 1973, “so they just make it up. I don’t see that it matters.”

Speaking before a 1973 Tate retrospective he was noticeably absent from and four years before his death, Burra wondered what personality had to do with art.

"Why don’t you just show the pictures? I suppose you have to have a personality.”

The irony is the man is such a fascination because of his personality. Despite crippling arthritis, which meant his hands were gnarled like claws and forced him to paint all but a few works in watercolours, the colour and life in his pictures reveal a man for whom the world was a stage filled with never-ending curios.

He travelled extensively. He loved jazz music. The dancehalls, cafés and drinking holes patronised by society’s underclass were where the man born into an upper middle-class family, but marginalised by his disabilities, found his drama. A great letter-writer, he wrote to his friend and former Unit One mentor Paul Nash (though, like Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, Burra was involved in the group only briefly) about his favourite hangout in Paris, the Minuit Chanson, or Midnight Song.

“It’s glorious; you put bits in the slot and listen to gramophone records. The clientele is enough to frighten you a little bit – what with listening with one ear and looking at the intrigues going on elsewhere. The people are glorious, such tarts, all crumbling and all sexes and colours.”

Had Burra made it to see the 70 works Pallant House curator Simon Martin has arranged thematically over six of the venue’s upstairs rooms, he would no doubt have been in the corner watching the wandering crowds, taking visual notes.

“He was a camera,” says Martin, “a spectator with an extraordinary memory for detail.”

What makes the often-surreal-yet-never-sentimental draughtsmanship all the more impressive is that the brush strokes were made from memory. He never worked from sketches or notes. While he was a film fan – he loved to watch schlock horror and you can see its influence bleeding into the more macabre works – the few photographs in the exhibition’s opening room are of friends rather than for prep.

Notably, there is the dancer Billy Chappell, with whom Burra, the sexual outsider who said he only ever had one erection in his life which was thanks to Mae West, is rumoured to have had an affair.

That first room, High Art Low Culture, has paper works inspired by both Hogarth and Hollywood. In the satirical Marriage à la Mode, full of double-entendres, are phallic-like flower bouquets and flying children who water a bride and groom’s headpieces with an atomiser.

On the opposite wall is Zoot Suits, a work from 1948 which sold in June at Sotheby’s for four times its list price at a little more than £2 million.

“There were four lots in that sale,” explains Martin.

“Two went abroad – one to America and one to Germany. It shows how important Burra is internationally. For many, he is the eye of the 20th century.”

In Zoot Suits, Burra seems to have painted himself observing the evocative poses and gestures of West Indians recently arrived in London.

The surrounding works reveal an adventurous, eccentric man, who travelled to escape the dreary monotony of conservative England. He called Rye “the Tinkerbell Towne” but he could never quite escape. Even after drinking up Harlem, Paris, the seedy French Mediterranean port towns and London’s Soho tarts in the provocative Snack Bar, he would return to Sussex to paint.

It is 25 years since the last Burra retrospective.

But, says Martin, the Hayward Gallery’s show was not as comprehensive.

Here, into room two, titled The Danse Macabre, is Burra’s reaction to conflict. War In The Sun, a clash of baroque conquistadors and modern soldiers destroying 1,000 years of history, was inspired by his travels to Spain. Later comes Ireland and It’s All Boiling Up, a suggestive piece portending to something terrible, with eyes in a black pot heated by monsters.

There are the landscapes which eschew abstraction in favour of accurate depictions of Rye – with pylons and cabbages – Hastings, and the realisation that man’s destructive tendencies are inherent. In Picking A Quarrel even the trucks cry oil-like tears at unrelenting modernity.

So why the renewed interest in Burra? One argument is Tate Britain’s survey of watercolours earlier in the year, where three of his later landscapes were shown in prominent positions. But such trivialities did not interest Burra. His wild spirit led him to take off to Spain when his mother thought he had gone to buy cigarettes.

While there, he would soak up the language as he did the view.

“A mis soledades voy, de mis soledades vengo,” wrote one of his favourite authors, Lope de Vega.

“To my solitudes I go, from my solitudes I come.”

* Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, Thursday, 10am to 8pm, Sunday, 11am to 5pm, closed Mondays. Tickets adult £7.50, child £2.30, student £4, family £17. Call 01243 774557 or visit www.pallant.org.uk