Paul Overy was an historian of art, architecture and design of impressive versatility. He was an art critic (for four years for The Times); he taught at numerous art schools (including the Royal College of Art, the Slade, the London Institute, and latterly Middlesex University, where he was Reader in the History and Theory of Modernism); he organised exhibitions (among others, of the work of Josef Albers); he wrote articles for academic journals as well as for newspapers and magazines; he wrote books; he even translated poetry from French.

Paul Vivian Overy was born in Dorchester in 1940. From University College School in London he progressed to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read not art history but English and philosophy, graduating in 1962. He taught, unhappily, at a primary school for a few months before taking a part-time job in the general studies department of a London art school. Such positions were easy to find, since, thanks to the recent Coldstream Report on art education, art history was on every art school’s curriculum.

Overy was soon publishing articles and books, as well as teaching. In 1969 his Kandinsky, the Language of the Eye appeared. Few people in Britain were remotely interested in the pioneer of abstract painting, but Overy wrote about his work with almost missionary zeal. The result was a fresh, original and abiding contribution to Kandinsky studies, not least because of the connections Overy perceived between the art and various scientific theories, especially Gestalt psychology. Four decades later the book remains on many reading lists.

Overy was less concerned with Kandinsky’s early, improvisatory abstractions than with his later more deliberate and disciplined compositions. He continued to prefer and favour a cool, geometric and perfectly poised sort of art, hence his enthusiasm not only in Kandinsky’s Bauhaus period but also in the work of Albers, Mondrian (and the other artists of De Stijl), and, nearer home, the constructivism of Kenneth and Mary Martin.

By the time the Kandinsky book appeared Overy had left Cambridge and was chief art critic of The Times, which he joined after writing for The Listener (1966-68) and the Financial Times (1968-71).

He remained at The Times until 1978 and then transferred to the International Herald Tribune (1979-81). This was his last regular appointment as an art critic, though he did continue to write quite often for Studio International and Art in America, among other specialist publications.

He continued to produce books, most notably on Dutch modernism. After a short, popular study of De Stijl (1969), he published a longer study of the movement (1991). This is both an accessible and scholarly book, in part the result of long hours spent in archives in London and the Netherlands, as were publications about The Rietveld Schröder House (1988) and The Complete Furniture of Gerrit Rietveld (1993).

It is likely that no one in England knew more about De Stijl than Overy. His last book, Light, Air and Openness, Modern Architecture Between the Wars, was published this year, when he was already terminally ill with pancreatic cancer.

Overy often worked in the old British Library, usually occupying one of the places in the typing room, which he would leave promptly at 12.45 every day for a solitary lunch at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street.

Though some acquaintances found him quiet to the point of diffidence, Overy was an utterly agreeable man, who could even be affable. He relished life, and loved the English countryside. Indeed, he was one of those Englishmen who felt and even seemed entirely English while at the same time pursuing an intense intellectual interest not only in the Netherlands but also in Central Europe, especially Hungary and Romania.

Overy married Teresa Ann Gronberg in 1992.

Paul Overy, art historian, critic and writer, was born on February 2, 1940. He died of cancer on August 7, 2008, aged 68