The Radev Collection: Modern Art and Chosen Family

Together, they frame the collection as a constellation of relationships rooted in chosen family and reflect on its position in relation to changes in queer history in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Emalee Beddoes and Norman Coates

Keywords: Mattei Radev; chosen family; Edward Sackville-West; Eardley Knollys; Duncan Grant; modernism

This conversation with Norman Coates, custodian of the Radev Collection, emerges from our collaboration on the exhibition Radev, which opened at The Wilson, in Cheltenham in March 2024. Working together on this show was both a curatorial journey through modernist art and an exploration of inheritance, intimacy, and the quiet radicalism of chosen family. From our very first meeting, Norman shared the collection not simply as a group of artworks, but as a constellation of relationships—paintings, drawings and friendships handed down with care.

The Radev Collection is an extraordinary body of work built across three lifetimes. It began with the writer Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville, whose early collecting reflected his love of modernism and friendships with artists like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. It passed to his friend, the critic and gallerist Eardley Knollys, who added works by artists including Picasso and Modigliani. In 1991, Knollys bequeathed the collection to his dear friend, the refugee picture framer Mattei Radev who added pieces by friends including Maggi Hambling and David Harkins.

Mattei Radev escaped post-war Bulgaria stowing away on a ship to Glasgow in 1950. After two weeks in prison, he built a new life in Britain and went on to establish himself as a picture framer. From humble beginnings as the son of a shopkeeper, Radev became deeply embedded in a milieu shaped by the legacy of the Bloomsbury Group. He had a gift for forming profound and sustaining relationships. Working as a hospital orderly, Mattei met eye surgeon and pioneer gay rights activist Patrick Trevor-Roper, and through Trevor-Roper, he was taken under the wing of a number of older, established gay men who guided and included him in a privileged world of intellectualism and creativity.

Now in the care of Norman, Mattei’s civil partner, the Radev Collection stands as a material record of this intergenerational, queer lineage. When we began to develop the exhibition together, we realised that the collection’s power lies not only in the names it contains, but in how it was passed on—not through bloodlines, but through affinity, trust, and a sense of belonging.

This exhibition was about making that ethos visible; exploring how the works hung in homes, exchanged between friends, and carried stories of solidarity in eras of both liberation and criminalisation. By framing the Radev Collection as a queer family collection we hoped to honour its quiet defiance of the idea that family must mean the nuclear or the normative. In doing so, we also foregrounded Norman’s own evolving role – not as a conventional curator, but as a devoted steward of these stories.

What follows is a conversation between Norman and I that shares his experiences of this unique role.

Emalee Beddoes:  Could you please explain how you became the owner of the Radev Collection and your experiences of being its custodian?

Norman Coates: I inherited all of Mattei’s paintings. Mattei was my partner for 38 years. He was 20 years older than me, and we'd been together for 38 years. He died in 2009 and it was not something I planned to have. I never thought about inheriting them. I never even presumed that I would get them although I'd lived with them for many years. It just never occurred to me that one day I would be looking after them. His entire estate came to me.

I didn’t particularly need to own anything. I lived with Mattei in his house - I couldn't collect paintings myself because the walls were covered in paintings already. So it never occurred to me to collect paintings. When I met him, I was living in an art commune in Kentish Town where we were not materialistic at all. So, I came into a sort of rather more bourgeois life when I met Mattei, and I came to live with him. So, it was all rather a surprise.

EB: I wonder how much that shapes the way you look after them, how you treat them almost as if they’re not yours.

NC: I try to. Part of me tries to pretend they're not mine. Of course, the word custodian is quite useful. But I prefer people not to think I own them. I feel more comfortable in myself now. Is that because I don't feel worthy? I did go to art school. I probably was not a bad person to inherit them because I love paintings. I am a painter.

EB: We've talked a lot about the way you've become a curator. Most people trained to be a curator and you've had curatorship thrust upon you. Can you share what this is like? I know you have lots of inquiries, the phone will ring and it's someone researching. How do you manage the almost responsibility of a collection, having never expected to have one?

NC: I've learned a lot from having them because I didn't know - I don't know enough even now - about the various schools of painting from which they came. Friends, I've been very blessed with friends who are far more intelligent, educated than me. And often somebody would say, oh, that painting, that's one of 36 similar ones by Jawlensky and I’d had no idea. So people would come here, and I would learn from much more educated people than myself and I’ve never minded that.

I've enjoyed lending them. it's always been a thrill to lend them because I've always felt a bit embarrassed to own them that I should have such extraordinary privilege to have them. I worry am I worthy of them? Do I believe in so many possessions and all that? I am a Quaker, so that's sort of in conflict as well - not that Quakers don't like paintings. […] And I don’t feel like I own them, but emotionally I'm very involved with them.

EB: It's very interesting and it is so comparable to the role of a curator in the way that I will look at a collection as my collection, and I love them and I care for them. But civic collections are owned by a place and an idea of collective ownership, and that allows you to treat them as objects of wonder and for people's benefit rather than commodities to be trading.

I think that's probably why you're the perfect person for them to go to.

NC: I like what you said because you've maybe put it better than I could. I do have that feeling that I don't own them and it's such a pleasure to have them. And share them.

EB: The language of the Radev collection as part of queer art history or queer family collection is quite new. When did you start talking to people about the collection in this way and opening dialogues around the Radev collection and gay history?

NC: I lived with these things. I lived with gay friends and Mattei’s friends, the older friends of his were homosexual. A lot of them, not exclusively at all, but they were able to live in a liberal world, so they weren't under pressure like a lot of gay men were in those days.

So these pictures always had a connection with a gay society. Obviously an educated and in some parts, upper class society with Edward Sackville West and Eardley [Knollys] who were both from aristocratic backgrounds. Mattei was the opposite, from a peasant background in Bulgaria. So, I never really saw that as a gay story. I saw it more as a kind of fairytale, rags to riches.

So, it was like Cinderella rather than a gay story. But because I lived in a gay world – not exclusively at all – but I lived so happily and easily surrounded by liberal straight friends and lovely warm gay friends that it just was naturally a gay story until it went on tours. Curators identified that much more closely than I would've. It's just natural to me.

EB: I suppose it's uncommon in art history – this being the family collection, but handed down to chosen family rather than to descendants. It’s also particularly amazing the way it encapsulates the twentieth century; how bad things were for gay men in the ‘50s and ‘60s and now, later, the outcome that you two had a civil partnership and they passed to you without a will as his legal next of kin.

NC: That's interesting. I hadn't seen that. When the collection started in the early 1920s when Eddy and Eardley met at Oxford they were above society in a way. They lived rather like the Bloomsbury Group, openly amongst their own safe society, sexually. And then, in the ‘40s and ‘50’s, gay life became much more dangerous and Mattei, in England in the ‘50s, succumbed to the danger a few times and got into trouble. He was ostracized. Police beat him up. It was a dangerous thing as he was living in a slightly lower level and more exposed to prejudice, but at the same time living in the liberal world of Bloomsbury and the London art scene. In a way there was a dip with Mattei’s experience of being gay, and then finally gay being much more okay. And the law changing and you know, it's absolutely wonderful, then I came along and working in the theatre as I did, I also never felt oppression.

Then Mattei and I were able to have a civil partnership, which is rather lovely – especially through the stories of how privilege previously gave people like Eddy and Eardley security, but now it's in law.

EB: One of the other things I wanted to talk about are works that were not part of the Radev collection, but which you are also the custodian: Duncan Grant's erotic drawings now at Charleston. And you chose to donate them to Charleston, which completely changes the narrative of Duncan Grant in art history. They had previously been kept secret with a note ‘very private’ on them, but you were in a position to make the choice to make them public knowing it wouldn't damage Duncan Grant's reputation.

NC: They were Duncan’s secret drawings, […] and they were his expression of fantasies, but he had to hide them away because he was having a big retrospective at the Tate [in 1959] of his own paintings, and the curators would be coming to the studio and snooping around. And at that point he thought he better get them out of the place because they would have fallen under the obscene publications act. He was very nervous about his reputation, quite understandably, but not ashamed of them, so he gave them to the artist and collector Edward Le Bas to look after them.

And they stayed with Edward and then Edward passed them on to Eardley and then Eardley passed them on to Mattei who put them under his bed famously. I forgot about them mostly, and sometimes brought them out.

EB: In doing that, it means that Duncan Grant is one of very few artists, queer artists, of the time whose erotica has been allowed to survive rather than be destroyed.

NC: Well, the time was right, it was always presumed that I would pass them on in secret as well. At one point I did tell the curator at Charleston that I had these things, and I showed them to him. That was 10 years before, and [when] the subject came up again, the time was just right. I thought the time has come for the Charleston to catalogue them correctly and do the right thing by them instead of them being under a bed. Then they said, ‘oh, we're going to have an exhibition’. And I had to grow up very quickly myself because I was so used to being a bit discreet about it. But it was right that they did that. And it's opened a lot of fresh air into people's thinking.

EB: Within a lot of these stories that we're talking about, you have the responsibility of making so many complex decisions about the collections. The collection is also your life story in its own way. I know that you often do not want to be featured in too much detail in exhibitions, for example. But how have you found so much of your personal experience becoming these public-facing stories?

NC: I am surprised to realise that a few people now know my name because I didn't see it as necessary. The collection was formed by three friends, and I thought it was a wonderful story and if I came into it, it actually rather spoiled the story because it's not as neat anymore. And this sort of drags on a bit beyond the lovely shape of it moving from aristocrat to a peasant. But it's been a wonderful entree into a lot of different worlds, and I've learned a lot. So, I can't complain. I met wonderful people.

EB: I wanted to talk about how you curate the collection in a way that feels really in keeping with how it was collected, how you care for the collection through making friendships and conviviality and developing conversations. And it makes me think about how the collection itself grew with lots of people getting together and talking in the collection’s various homes at Knole, Long Crichel and in Mattei’s workshop.

NC: Well, I have in a way been become a curator. I’m surprised you’ve called me that. It is a domestic collection. The Radev collection […] is about people who were not ashamed, not frightened, were comfortable in themselves. And I think that comfort comes through to people. Mattei’s [story] obviously had a struggle in coming to the country, but its narrative is one of friendship and togetherness, friendship and mentorship.

Mattei was mentored by his friends who were twenty years older than him – he was a generation below. He wasn't part of any class system. He was good looking. He had a sense of humour. He wasn't frightened of people and people really took to him. But what I think is that all men, gay or straight, need a bit of mentorship. You get that in the gay world, largely get because they become family. Gay men are exposed, very exposed because, even if you've got a partner, eventually you still have to work out who you are, because you're gay and there's no sort of pattern as in the heterosexual world.

EB: In Mattei’s story, and I suppose yours to a similar extent, [you] were able to find the person that helped you write that structure for yourself.

NC: Yeah. It's really interesting the sort of intergenerational mentorship. I certainly benefited from Mattei’s existence and Eardley’s existence particularly. I formed part of myself on what I observed, and the pictures then came naturally into my identity. […] I'm not ashamed to say that I love beautiful things, and we should love beautiful things and we should seek out beautiful things. And that's what they were able to do, certainly Eardley and Eddy, because they had the money, they had the situation to thrive in that world and choose what they wanted. Mattei luckily fell into that world and learned that's what he loved. He didn't know art, he hardly knew what a picture was when he arrived, or frames.

EB: But through that sort of generous, intergenerational care, he learned from them.

NC: Absolutely, he learned from them.

EB: And you've continued to learn.

NC: And I learned from him.

EB: And you are in turn making this more widely available and letting other people benefit from hearing their positive and important story.

Emalee Beddoes is currently Curator of Collections and Engagement at Hereford Museums Service. Previously, she curated at The Wilson in Cheltenham, Birmingham Museums Trust, Museums Worcester, and Division of Labour Gallery.

Norman Coates is the custodian of the Radev Collection.