In 1950s Britain, the history of art was an esoteric subject. Iris Murdoch, in her 1958 novel, The Bell, identifies one character as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute (one of the few places where the subject could then be studied) to signify his impeccable taste and unpleasant personality. Art history was largely restricted to ascertaining the attribution of artists' works.

This narrowness arose from the requirements of the art market and museums, almost the only places where art historians had any hope of employment before university departments were established in the mid-1960s. Michael Podro was one of a handful of pioneers who transformed art history, here and abroad, into an ambitious humanities discipline comparable with philosophy, literature and history.

Podro's career was devoted to two institutions - Camberwell School of Art, where he founded the art history department in 1961, and the University of Essex, where he was appointed Reader of the newly established Department of Art History and Theory in 1969, gaining his chair in 1973. While not the department's founder, he was largely responsible for its intellectual direction.

Born in 1931 to Joshua and Fanny Podro, Michael Isaac Podro grew up in the North London suburb of Hendon within a highly cultured family. Joshua, a Jewish immigrant from Belorussia, ran a successful press-cuttings agency by day while devoting his evenings to biblical scholarship. He collaborated with Robert Graves on the trilogy The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953-57). As a young man he had participated in a flourishing Yiddish circle including the poet Isaac Rosenberg and painters such as David Bomberg. His sister-in-law, Clara Klinghoffer (1900-70), Michael's aunt, was a successful painter and draughtswoman.

Unsurprisingly, Michael Podro became passionately interested in painting and painted constantly from an early age. Educated at Berkhamsted School, he spent his National Service in the RAF, followed by Cambridge University, where he read English and was influenced by F.R.Leavis's commitment to the close reading of literary texts.

After graduating he enrolled in 1955 as a part-time student at the Slade to study drawing with the intention of becoming a professional painter. He was, by all accounts, highly talented. He was also working out how the principles of Cambridge literary criticism could be applied to the visual arts, while exploring the psychological processes involved in our experience of works of art and their philosophical implications.

Ernst Gombrich was teaching art history at the Slade, where he delivered the lectures which became Art and Illusion (1960). Podro attended the weekly seminars given by Gombrich who regarded him as a gifted thinker of great potential. In 1956, under the joint supervision of Gombrich and the philosopher Richard Wollheim, Podro began a PhD on the 19th-century German neo-Kantian theorist of art, Konrad Fiedler. In 1959 he renounced painting to concentrate on art history. He obtained his PhD in 1961.

The same year Podro founded the art history department at the Camberwell School of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) in order to meet the curricular requirements of the 1960 Coldstream report.

He created a simple structure whereby art students had a weekly seminar discussing works of art either in class or on visits to London galleries, a practice which he thought essential.

In 1967 he became a lecturer at the Warburg Institute where Gombrich was director, but when a permanent post failed to materialise he took the opportunity provided by a readership at Essex to put his ideas about art historical education into effect.

His curriculum was challenging. In their first year students had to grapple with Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, in their second year with the ideas of German art historians from Wölfflin to Gombrich, and in their final year with the aesthetics of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schiller and Hegel. They were expected to bring theory to bear upon their interpretation of artists' work.

As at Camberwell, Podro built frequent visits to London museums into the structure and budget of the course as well as a fortnight's visit to Florence. Central to his pedagogy was the student's involvement with the complexity of the original work rather than with the simplified reproductions. He was highly attentive and sympathetic to his students's inchoate attempts to express their reactions in words. He assembled a talented team of lecturers who were also searching for a fresh approach.

Both Podro and the Essex department were regarded with some scepticism, if not hostility, by the art historical establishment, but increasingly Essex PhDs filled posts in other departments as the importance of art theory came to be recognised. As his reputation grew, Podro was made a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1987, a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and was appointed CBE in the Millennium Honours List.

Podro's three finely honed books manifest his educational commitments. Central to The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (1972) is Schiller's account of the way that the drive to play engages with our experience of works of art. In excess, reason and sensory experience can be constraining influences, whereas play and the arts provide us with a sense of freedom unfettered by practical concerns.

Ten years later Podro gave this insight a historical dimension in The Critical Historians of Art (1982), his most influential book, which earned him an international following. Podro's key idea is that art is a form of thought. Here the important figure is Hegel, whose Lectures on Fine Art inspired the German art historical tradition from Rumohr to Panofsky. Podro made art historians aware of the philosophical underpinning of the German tradition, which did not offer a systematic methodology so much as models for how to attend to the complexity of thought embodied in art. The Critical Historians helped to transform British and American art history into a more intellectual academic discipline.

In Depiction (1998) Podro turned to some of his favourite artists: Donatello, Titian, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Chardin. A major idea concerns the ways in which the spectator can use the imagination playfully to achieve an orientation to the image. His approach is always ingenious and often produces highly original insights into the artistic process.

Podro also wrote about contemporary art, particularly the London School. He and Frank Auerbach became close friends after meeting at Camberwell in 1961. Both Podro and his wife Charlotte sat regularly for Auerbach. Podro also had a deep interest in psychoanalysis that he brought to bear upon his own work. From 1998 to 2005 he was chairman of the trustees of the Squiggle Foundation, which disseminates the ideas of the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott, for whom play was central to maturation.

Podro was a highly convivial man; the department resounded with laughter, as did the train home from Colchester to London, often to the consternation of other passengers. His approach to academic life was collaborative. He generously read and commented perceptively on drafts of books and articles written by colleagues, at Essex and beyond, whose careers he also nurtured. He worked closely with Michael Baxandall, author of Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, whom he met at the Warburg when they were research students in the late 1950s.

Podro retired in 1998, becoming Professor Emeritus. In addition to honorary degrees from the University of Essex (1999) and the University of the Arts (2006) he had been a visiting professor at the University of Tel Aviv (1981) and at the University of California at Berkeley (1991).

Podro met his wife, Charlotte Booth, a conservator in the RIBA collection of architectural drawings, when they were students at the Slade. They married in 1961 and shared interests in art, literature and music. He is survived by her and their two daughters.

Professor Michael Podro, CBE, art historian, was born on March 13, 1931. He died of cancer on March 28, 2008, aged 77