Collecting Modernism review – unique set of artworks a testament to queer culture

The kind of art you want to hang in your house, which is what they were doing … Edward Le Bas, EK [Eardley Knollys], Reading, c.1960s. Photograph: The Radev Collection

Three queer men built what is now known as the Radev Collection over the course of the 20th century, and it has become an intimate, idiosyncratic vision of modern art. Most collections are the product of a single person’s taste, but this one was handed down from man to man in a creative, purposeful inheritance of chosen family. It’s the story of that collaborative queer heritage that guides this exhibition, making it a nuanced exploration of what makes an art collection more than the sum of its parts.

Now on display at Charleston in Lewes, the collection was begun by Edward “Eddy” Sackville-West. In 1945, he and his close friend, gallerist Eardley Knollys bought an old rectory in Dorset, along with two other friends. Knollys and Sackville-West went about filling the house with the former’s penchant for French modernism and the latter’s inclination towards British work, often by friends including Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and John Banting.

In 1957, the two men met a Bulgarian immigrant, Mattei Radev, at a party. Knollys and Radev had a brief affair, then became lifelong friends. When Sackville-West died in 1965, he left his collection to Knollys, and Knollys in turn left it to Radev on his death in 1991. It’s now under the care of Radev’s widower, Norman Coates, and has been since Radev’s death in 2009.

The exhibition begins with early works of French modernism by the likes of Camille Pissarro, (possibly) Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, before moving into works from members of the Bloomsbury Group and the Camden Town Group by Grant, Bell and Spencer Gore. Then there are highlights of mostly British art throughout the mid-20th century, including work by Matthew Smith, Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Frances Hodgkins. Mostly, though, the artists featured here are less known to 2024 eyes, offering some lovely new discoveries and a window into the varying tastes of collectors in the 20th century. The works are often small in scale, and mostly very pleasant to look at: the kind of art you would want to hang in your own house, which was what the collectors were doing, after all.

While there are some especially stunning works in the show – Gore’s Mornington Crescent, Armand Guillaumin’s Le Creuze, a tiny and remarkable painting of St Mark’s in Venice by John Piper, and a really glowing nude by Grant – there are some that fall a bit flat, too. The Picasso print is forgettable, and some of the later works from the 1950s onward have less of the panache of the modernist section. But the strength of the exhibition is its focus on the collection itself as a cohesive whole, not just the individual works.

Not all collections have such a strong ethos to them, and not all exhibitions about collections communicate so clearly what makes the collection unique: in this case, both are true. The exhibition’s story represents a remarkable intersection between art and the home, not just because the art was collected for a domestic space, but because the collection is also the project of a series of queer men living in radically unconventional homes that were built around their relationships with other men, both romantic and platonic.

Charleston’s commitment to focusing on queer identities in 20th-century British art, which now extends beyond the original farmhouse to this new space in Lewes, has allowed curators to draw out nuanced stories, like that of Sackville-West, Knollys and Radev, that offer a window into a very specific way of living with art. In some ways, it feels very 20th century: the inherited privilege that allowed Sackville-West to live a life surrounded by other queer men in pursuit of aesthetic fulfilment is the stuff of, well, Bloomsbury.

But this collection’s story is complicated by loss and poverty, too. Knollys lost his partner Frank Coombs in a bombing raid during the second world war, and Radev endured extreme hardship as a refugee travelling across Europe from Bulgaria, and then grinding poverty when he finally arrived in England in 1950. The tenacity of the three men’s love for each other and for the community they built together preserved the art they so treasured. It’s a remarkable reimagining of the way inheritance, and even ownership itself, can be conceived: moving away from the asset-oriented single mindedness we usually associate with private collectors towards something more loving and collaborative.

• Collecting Modernism: Pablo Picasso to Winifred Nicholson is at Charleston, Lewes, until 2 March