Norbert Lynton was one of the last of the scholar-critics, a breed now more or less extinct. He was also one of those many gifts to the cultural and intellectual life of this country brought to us by the Jewish flight from Germany of the 1930s in the face of the Nazi threat.

Norbert Casper Loewenstein was born in Berlin in 1927, the youngest of three sons of a Jewish publisher, Paul Loewenstein (who would take the name Lynton in 1944), and his Roman Catholic wife, Amalie. Theirs was a cultivated family, actively interested in the arts, his father continuing to play the piano in defiance of a finger lost in the Great War.

The boys' upbringing was normal enough at first, but all was to change with Hitler's rise to power. With the Reichstag fire of February 1933, their father, being Jewish, lost his job, then worked in a dressmaking business owned by a relative, whom he persuaded to let him set up a branch in London. He left Germany in 1934, the family following in 1935, living first in Hampstead and then in Esher. But, the following year, the father having lost that job too and run out of funds, the boys were sent back to Germany, where they were split up between schools in Berlin and Cologne.

In April 1938, with the political outlook rapidly worsening, the boys were summarily brought back to England where, as yet speaking hardly any English, Norbert was consigned to the Benedictine Fathers at Douai Abbey in Berkshire. By the time he left he was head boy and a member, albeit it seems a reluctant one, of the school's 1st XV. Though by then with a perfect command of English, he would always retain in his voice just a hint of his German origins.

The end of the war found him back in London, working part-time while taking first a general degree at Birkbeck College, London University, before going on to study the history of art at the Courtauld Institute, and find his true course in life.

Scholarship claimed him soon enough, but it was as an art critic in the 1960s that he first made his name in the broader art world, first as the London correspondent for Art International and then, from 1965, as art critic of The Guardian. He won in those years respect and affection he was never to lose, and was to remain ever a familiar figure on the gallery circuit, unfailingly curious as to the currency of contemporary work, and no less generous towards successive generations of younger artists, all sustained by an easy courtesy and engaging, if sharp, wit.

But he took people seriously, expecting seriousness in what they did, and his hard-won respect was the greater compliment. Yet, which is perhaps a truism of that marginal profession, the critic's deeper loyalties and understanding will always rest with his own nearer contemporaries, who first formed his interests and judgment. The list of the particular artists on whom he would come to write substantial studies — such as Ben Nicholson, William Scott, Victor Pasmore, Jack Smith and Marc Vaux — and an early and marked sympathy for the abstract in art, suggest that in this he was no exception.

But distinguished as he was under his art-critical hat — and he would continue to write occasional pieces throughout his life — it is as an art historian and a teacher of art that he will be more properly remembered, and where his distinction and importance more truly lie. In 1970 he had turned gamekeeper, jumping over the fence to become director of exhibitions at the Arts Council, with the but recently opened Hayward Gallery his principal charge.

His time there was marked by a succession of exhibitions as various as they were remarkable, from Tantric and Celtic Art to the first Lucian Freud retrospective, by way of Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, Diane Arbus, Salvator Rosa, Mark Rothko, Arnold Böcklin and Palladio, at a rate of a dozen or so a year.

In 1975, however, he jumped over the fence again, not back to criticism, but to the teaching of art history, which in fact had always been his principal commitment. Upon graduating from the Courtauld, he had been, from 1950 to 1961, a lecturer in the history of art and architecture at the Leeds College of Art, and then, throughout the 1960s, even while freelancing as a critic, the head of art history at the Chelsea School of Art. In 1975 he was appointed Professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex, in which post he was to remain, latterly as Dean of the School of European Studies, until 1989.

He could hardly have taken up the post at a more critical time in the development of the discipline. The university itself was barely ten years old, and art history as such still in its comparative infancy as a properly academic study for a first degree. Even now there are those who hold it to be proper only at postgraduate level, and over these past 60 years, at least in England, it has been left to the Victorian and newer universities to set the pace — Manchester, East Anglia, Essex, Nottingham, Leicester, Liverpool and lately Birmingham notable among them, each with its own slant and emphasis.

Where Sussex under Lynton was to prove itself a particular model and example was in the study of recent and especially of contemporary art, a field in which it remains outstanding to this day. In this the 20 years he spent in art schools, working alongside artists at every level, and as a critic addressing their work fresh on gallery or studio walls, can hardly have been more pertinent an experience, or of more direct and practical use to his new students. He never forgot that a work of art is something made and achieved, not merely conceived beforehand.

In all this time, his more public career was marked at intervals by the appearance of books on his own immediate interests. They include Kenneth Armitage (1962), Paul Klee (1964), The Story of Modern Art (1980), Victor Pasmore (1992) and William Scott (2004). His study of the Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin was completed this year. The handily compact Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, which he compiled with Erica Langmuir (2000), has proved to be indispensable.

He married his first wife, Janet Irving, in 1949, and his second, Sylvia Towning, in 1969, by each of whom he had two sons. Though separated for many years, he remained on good terms with his second wife, who, with his sons, survives him.

Professor Norbert Lynton, art critic and historian, was born on September 22, 1927. He died on October 30, 2007, aged 80