Husband Norman Coates
Queer Places:
Long Critchel House, Long Crichel, Wimborne BH21 5LE, UK
Slade Hill House, Froxfield, Petersfield GU32 1EB, UK
Mattei Radev (November
27, 1927 - October 14, 2009) was born on 13 November 1927 into a fraternity of
shopkeepers, formerly from Macedonia, who also owned vineyards around the
village of Brestovitza. Following the confiscation of their property by the
Communists,
Radev arrived in Britain in 1950 after escaping
communist Bulgaria by swimming across a river to Turkey, and then hiding in
the lifeboat of a cargo ship travelling from Istanbul to Glasgow, where he
was able to claim asylum. He later moved to London, where while working as
an orderly at Whittington Hospital, he met the early gay activist and noted
eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper. Trevor Roper was a leading eye surgeon and was the author of ‘The World Through Blunted Sight’ (1971) examining the way artists’ eye defects and illnesses have affected their work. According to architectural historian Mark Girouard, he provided the funds for the campaign to save the 18th century houses of Spitalfields from demolition. He was also amongst those willing to testify publicly along with his Suffolk neighbour,
Angus Wilson, to Sir
John Wolfenden’s Home Office committee on homosexual offences and prostitution in the mid-1950s. Trevor-Roper made plain his claim that homosexuality was innate, and not the result of “seduction” or “recruitment”. The younger brother of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, he introduced Mattei to the founder of the Zwemmer Gallery Robert Wellington and via an apprenticeship with Robert Savage set up by
Robert Medley (who painted his portrait).
Radev's exotic Balkan face, with lashings of thick dark hair, brought him to the attention of the eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper who introduced him to Robert Wellington, founder of the Zwemmer Gallery. Radev graduated thereafter from a Camden Town doss house into Wellington's home in one of the Nash Terraces in Regent's Park. Their neighbour was Margaret Rutherford, who noted that their initials were the same and suggested he Anglicise his name to "Matthew Radford". Although he never did, she called him that each time she saw him.
Various nondescript jobs followed, including for
Hardy Amies and for the fabric magnate Sir Nicholas Sekers, before the artist
Robert Medley suggested framing some of his paintings. This led to an apprenticeship with Robert Savage, who had a framers and gallery in the Brompton Road and who was as uncompromising as his name suggests. Eventually Radev was sacked for no good reason and forced to borrow £9,000 in 1960 to start up his own business in the then bohemian quarter around Fitzroy Square. The former Gallery owner
Eardley Knollys, a friend who
he had met in 1957, loaned funds to begin his business and all three were part of a coterie centred on a country house which seems to have been disrupted when a member,
Eddy, Lord Sackville-West died. Another attendee at the house was
George ‘Daddie’ Rylands, English scholar, theatre director and promotor of talented gay boys (who included
Wilfred Blunt and
Anthony Blunt) at Cambridge.
He was
Lytton Strachey’s “sweet canary Don” on account of his beauty and blond hair, and was intimately involved with the Bloomsbury group, many of them ex-Kings graduates. He is a key locus for connections, via his famous parties, between disparate queer figures so that
Michael Redgrave and
Arthur Marshall for instance
were introduced to Anthony Blunt.
Radev was a lover of the writer
E.M. Forster, with whom he began an affair in 1960. His distinguished customers included
Vanessa Bell,
Duncan Grant, Graham Sutherland,
John Banting and Princess Michael of Kent, who at that time was working as an interior designer. Radev ran the business until the early 1990s when he sold it. He kept ownership of his original framing workshop building in Fitzrovia, London, which he used as his private home and where he displayed his art collection, which was not open to the public.
Radev's friend Eardley Knollys ran the Storran Gallery in London with his partner Frank Coombs from 1936 and 1944. They sold works by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo and Chaïm Soutine. Coombs was killed in an air raid in Belfast in 1941, which led to Knollys closing the gallery in 1944.
Edward Sackville-West, who had briefly been Knollys' lover when they were students at Oxford University in the early 1920s, later became a life long friend. In 1945, Knollys, Sackville-West and the music critic
Desmond Shawe-Taylor together bought a Georgian rectory at Long Crichel, Dorset, where they held weekend salons, attended by some of the most notable cultural figures of the period, including
Benjamin Britten,
Nancy Mitford, Graham Greene and
Somerset Maugham. Radev often visited; it was there that he met E.M. Forster.
In 1965, Eardley Knollys inherited a large collection of artworks from
Edward Sackville-West, who began the collection in 1938, which he added to and on his death in 1991,
bequeathed to Radev. The collection,
now known as The Radev Collection, consists of more than 800 works of
Impressionist and Modernist art. The Radev Collection is a private art collection comprising works by
65 artists including Vanessa Bell, Georges Braque, Eugène Boudin, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Maurice Denis, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Amedeo Modigliani, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, Lucien Pissarro, Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland, and Alfred Wallis, many of whom were known personally by the three men who put the collection together. It includes works by Radev and Knollys, and portraits of each of them by Duncan Grant. It also has works by Knollys' late partner, Frank Coombs. One of the notable works is Two Male Nudes (1946) by
Keith Vaughan, which was given to E.M. Forster by
Christopher Isherwood. Forster later gave it to Radev, who he was in love with.
Radev only ever sold one painting from the collection he inherited, Portrait de Lagar, a Modigliani from 1915.
Knollys and Radev bought a former hunting lodge in Hampshire in 1967, which had an artist's studio where they both painted. They used the lodge as a country retreat
and it was also an escape for writers including
James Lees-Milne and
Frances Marshall. Lives intertwined there without constraints of convention: guests sitting down to dinner were as likely to include the
Sitwells, the cleaning lady, or both. It was a state of friendship into which others entered and sometimes departed, but didn't come between, which lasted until Knollys' death in 1991.
The collection was then inherited by Radev.
After Frances Partridge died in 2004, Radev found himself a vestige of Bloomsbury, a curious position for a Bulgarian
emigre attained by sublime means of friendship. There is a lost remark in Forster's Passage to India made to Adela by Mrs Moore which disappeared before the final version. The wistfulness of it is reminiscent of what was written much later by Forster to Radev: "You have succeeded in making everyone very kind to you, my dear. I wonder how long they will go on? People used to be kind to me." To those around him, Mattei Radev generally radiated good feeling and was enduringly the recipient of it.
Radev died in 2009, survived by his civil partner Norman Coates, the theatrical designer. Selected works from the collection were made available online in 2011 and selected paintings were exhibited in London and other locations in England between 2011 and 2013.
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