Invented in 1959 by Gustav Metzger, who has died aged 90, auto-destructive art was about the event rather than the object. It defined the joining of his art and activism, to become a powerful voice in anti-nuclear protest and environmentalism. Its materials, which were often pitted against each other, came from industry as well as the studio.

Auto-destructive art rose out of the shadow cast by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cold war brinkmanship that followed. Its first manifestos followed Metzger’s involvement with the Direct Action Committee against nuclear war (DAC) and its actions against missile bases in East Anglia, and coincided with the formation of its successor, the Committee of 100. Metzger was a founder member of this group, which had grown out of the DAC and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but which advocated direct action. In September 1961 he went to prison alongside Bertrand Russell and 30 other members of the committee for encouraging mass non-violent civil disobedience and refusing to be bound over to keep the peace.

Metzger told the court: “I came to this country from Germany when 12 years old. My parents disappeared in 1943 and I would have shared their fate. But the situation is now far more barbarous than Buchenwald ... for there can be absolute obliteration at any moment. I have no other choice than to assert my right to live, and we have chosen, in this committee, a method of fighting which is the exact opposite of war – the principle of total non-violence.”

Heedless of the commercial art market, as a public art for everybody and not a privileged few, auto-destructive art stands witness to society’s capacity to engineer its own downfall through development of the weaponry of mass destruction, the action of the capitalist system and damage to natural ecologies.

Gustav Metzger demonstrating auto-destructive art at the South Bank, London, 1961. He used a paint spray gun and acid on nylon sheets, which began to disintegrate after a few seconds. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

His ambition for auto-destructive art was for it to be a public monument to the “obscene present”, and among his first examples were paintings with acid on nylon sheets that consequently disintegrated, most graphically in 1961 on the South Bank in London, when in militaristic gas mask and goggles he sprayed acid on red, black and white sheets – the colours of anarchism.

His manifestos and small sculptural models envision large monuments not created by the expressive hand of the artist but inside a factory, where the artist would work as an architect might. The rusting and crumbling away of the monument over a number of years would be the work of the polluted environment. He was not an iconoclast but devised situations in which destructive forces could be shown for what they are and also be turned in on themselves, bringing about a creative physical and material change and reflecting the possibility for moral change in the world.

Through the 1960s and 70s he continued to investigate the implications of his discovery, working with the random movement of liquid crystals (a version of which is currently on display at Tate Modern) and the action of compressed air. With these later works, harnessing materials found in laboratories, he wished to show how destruction and creation existed side by side.

In 1966 he organised the Destruction in Art Symposium (Dias) in London. Some 50 avant garde artists from 10 countries took part, as well as scientists, philosophers and psychoanalysts, to link theoretical issues of destruction with actual instances of destruction taking place in society, in science and art, including, in Metzger’s words, “atmospheric pollution, creative vandalism, destruction in protest, planned obsolescence, popular media, urban sprawl/overcrowding, war … biology, economics, medicine, physics, psychology, sociology, space research”.

Dias was a landmark in the rejection of the objectified image in favour of the event, the happening and the performance, emphasising a multifaceted engagement with social and political forces. The three-day symposium and the month-long sequence of related events introduced British audiences to the American happening artists, Yoko Ono, and the Viennese Actionists, performing outside Austria for the first time. Hermann Nitsch’s 21st Action, the crucifixion of an eviscerated lamb with film of a man’s penis being manipulated by strings was stopped by the police. Metzger was fined £100 for obscenity.

The random creativity of Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystals at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2009. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

During the exhibition Art into Society/Society into Art at the ICA in 1974, Metzger called for a three-year withdrawal of labour by artists – an art strike that he alone carried out (1977-80).

Born into an orthodox Jewish family in Nuremberg, he and his brother Max (or Mendel) were evacuated in 1939 to Britain through the Kindertransport scheme. His parents, Juda and Fanny, his eldest brother, Chaim, his grandparents and many of his close relatives perished in the Holocaust. His sisters Klara and Esther escaped via Sweden, living first in a kibbutz in Manchester and later settling in Israel. During the war Gustav moved around Britain, from London to Hemel Hempstead, Leeds, Clifton, Tring and Cambridge, where he was reunited with Max.

In Leeds Gustav attended a cabinet-making course and worked in a factory making Utility furniture, before moving to a workshop on the Harewood estate. At this time he became interested in the revolutionary politics of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, which was leavened by his discovery of the different idealisms within the work of Eric Gill and the Hungarian natural healer Edmund Székely, and at Harewood he became a lifelong vegetarian, reinforced when in 1944 he was briefly a gardener at the Champneys Nature Cure Clinic in Tring. He had gone there from an anarcho-Trotskyite commune in Clifton outside Bristol, where he had been introduced to the writing of the radical psychologist Wilhelm Reich.

The move to Champneys also reflected a fundamental shift towards art and a desire to be a sculptor. In 1945, first in Cambridge and then in London, the two brothers studied art, and, by chance rather than design, found themselves attending classes given by the then marginalised painter David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic.

The encounter with Bomberg and the extended period until 1953 in which they were associated were crucial for Gustav, not just in terms of artistic practice – a way of painting, drawing and seeing the world – but in that art was held by Bomberg to be the embodiment of a social force and a social use. Between 1945 and 1959, Gustav wanted to be a sculptor but found himself a painter. Towards the end of this period, after he had broken with Bomberg, he made a series of small paintings of a round table that fill the canvas, elevating and celebrating a humble domestic piece of furniture that is the stage for all sorts of social exchanges and activities. Recently Metzger said that these paintings also suggest “a connection to the tablet of Moses”: the table represents a life lived as the enactment of one’s responsibilities. But the image also mutates into a mushroom cloud. Metzger was feeling his way to connecting his painting with his growing need to act responsibly, faced with the threat of an ever-present human capacity to engineer total obliteration.

Gustav Metzger interviewed by Andrew Wilson

I first met Metzger as a young art history student urged by my professor, the critic and historian Norbert Lynton, to meet an artist whom he described to me as both unknown and historically important. I encouraged him to put on a lecture-demonstration in 1983 at Sussex University, to which fewer than 10 people turned up; 25 years later I interviewed him in a packed auditorium at Tate Modern. He had started to become more visible upon his return to London in 1994 after a decade or more travelling through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and Holland. He had exhibitions, first in 1995 in the book space workfortheeyetodo in Shoreditch, east London, run by the artists and poets Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, where his new body of work, titled Historic Photographs, was unveiled. This exhibition and accompanying book of writings on which I collaborated with Gustav was seen by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who put Metzger at the heart of Life/Live, the exhibition of art in Britain that Obrist made for the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since then an unbroken sequence of exhibitions in publicly funded art galleries around the world is testament to the urgency of the messages contained within his work.

Like his theory of auto-destructive art, the Historic Photographs were conceived as public works of art, but rather than use destructive forces within the work he concentrated on historical news imagery. Newspapers were a favourite material for Metzger, who would carry around bags full of copies, as material, information and documentation. The series adopted strategies that engaged with the spectator’s reaction to and relationship with the imagery, production, delivery and reception of news. In the Historic Photographs, the photographic element is often obscured. Metzger chose images that were so well known that he felt they could no longer be properly seen, or their true significance no longer recognised. “We cannot be sure what we are looking at,” he said. “Memory and recall are in action, but what certainties are there?”

The past two decades have been largely concerned with nature, ecology and the fragility of the planet. In Flailing Trees (2009), a group of willow trees was upended in concrete outside the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, their branches cut down and their dead roots exposed to the air. He also addressed these issues through public actions, lectures and texts that drew attention to the dangers of extinction and the multiple betrayals that humankind has visited on nature.

Metzger imagined in 1992 a return to the Nuremberg of his childhood and the forests around the city: “Nature has been turned into a hybrid environment … It is not just that Nature is wiped out: it is our memory that is overturned. It is our apprehension of a future, where people will not have that contact with forests where an englobing experience was given – shelter, verdancy. Not knowing is a form of erasure. It is quite different from not having.”

Extinction was a subject he returned to many times. A little over a year ago, he made a call for a day of action to Remember Nature and make a stand “against the ongoing erasure of species – even where there is little chance of ultimate success. It is our privilege and our duty to be at the forefront of the struggle. There is no choice but to follow the path of ethics into aesthetics.”

• Gustav Metzger, artist and activist, born 10 April 1926; died 1 March 2017

• This article was amended on 7 March 2017. The name of one of Gustav Metzger’s sisters was Klara rather than Sara.