To mark a new exhibition in the former drawing room of Pallant House, guest curator Dr Sharon-Michi Kusunoki, Head of House, Gallery, Archives and Collections at West Dean, considers the extraordinary environments of three former Sussex residents who were pivotal figures in the movement of surrealism to England.

At a time when most public institutions in Britain pointedly ignored modern art, Edward James (1907-1984) from West Dean, West Sussex and Roland Penrose (1900-1984) from Chiddingly, East Sussex were instrumental in bringing the European avant-garde to the attention of the British public and artistic sector: James through his extensive patronage, and Penrose through his curatorial and collecting activities. During the 1930s their collections were arguably two of the most important bodies of Surrealist art in Europe, and it was Roland Penrose who helped to organise the first International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, an exhibition to which Edward James was to lend. The new show at Pallant House Gallery, 'Surrealism in Sussex' celebrates this rich tradition of surrealism in the county through a glimpse into the worlds of Edward James and the Penroses, Roland and his wife, Lee Miller (1907-1977), focusing on their surrealist subversion of the interior.

Best known as a patron, Edward James' collection was diverse. However it is without a doubt that his greatest commitment was to the art of the surrealists: Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, the first 'surrealist' he supported on a grand scale. One of the rare few who chose to build surrealism, James created, with the passion of an artist and phenomenal imagination, some of the most successful and harmonious examples of fantasy architecture and interior decoration of the 1930s - a hybrid, one might say, of the theatrical and the surrealist states of the marvellous. In London, James transformed his mid-Georgian Wimpole Street home into a highly theatrical spectacle - with lobster telephones, classical marble columns, billowing satin draperies, lush swags, and tremendous garlands. In the bathroom designed for his wife, the Viennese ballerina Tilly Losch, James immortalised Tilly's wet footprint by having it woven into the carpet that led to her bathroom.

In West Sussex, James transformed his family's Lutyen's designed hunting lodge, Monkton House, into a Surrealist hermitage. Here James fused traditional architectural elements and stylistic influences with an eclecticism and imagination that integrated the past, the present and the world of fantasy, in a coherent way. In it he placed the highly celebrated 'Mae West Lips Sofa', and in 1986 after James's death, Monkton was publicly acknowledged to be Britain's most remarkable example of environmental surrealism.

Roland Penrose was born into a wealthy Quaker family, and although he initially trained as an architect at Queens' College, Cambridge, he went to Paris in 1922 to study painting and began a career as a writer and surrealist painter. Of Penrose's many achievements, one of his most important is undoubtedly his contribution to the International Surrealist Exhibition which proved to be a seminal marker, or stepping-stone, for British surrealism. Penrose also wrote the first major English biography of Pablo Picasso and with the help of a loan from James for the 1936 exhibition, was responsible for bringing the work of Picasso to the eye of the British public. Penrose's collection included masterpieces by Picasso, Miró, De Chirico, Ernst, Magritte, Tanguy, Arp, Dalí and many other Surrealist works, as well as a fine group of ethnographic objects. In 1937 he met the photographer Lee Miller at a surrealist fancy dress ball and they married in 1947, the year in which he co-founded, with Herbert Read, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London.

Lee Miller from Poughkeepsie, New York, began her career as a top fashion model. In 1929 she became the lover, pupil and collaborator of the surrealist photographer Man Ray in Paris, and later ran her own studio in New York. Her surrealist images have earned her a key place in the history of art, but it is for her hauntingly disturbing work as a Second World War combat photographer that she is more widely known. Roland Penrose and Lee Miller were close friends to a number of artists including Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and Leonora Carrington, all of whom they loved to entertain at their home at Farley Farm in Chiddingly.

Edward James's home, West Dean, is now a College dedicated to the study of conservation, making and the visual arts and the home of the Penrose's, Farley Farm, has been opened to the public by their only child Antony. This exhibition, 'Surrealism in Sussex', is based on the premise that the creation of a work of art consists of two things, a creative factor, and equally important, an environment which allows this to operate.