Gustav Metzger, a German-born artist and political radical whose entire career consisted of pointed attacks on the capitalist system, the commodification of art and organized power, died on March 1 at his home in London. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his publicist, Erica Bolton.

Mr. Metzger, who went to England in 1939 as a young refugee from Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train, first became known as the theorist of “auto-destructive art.” In one of the manifestoes he began issuing in 1959, he described it as “an art that re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummeling to which individuals and masses are subjected.”

At the Temple Galley in London in 1960, he demonstrated the concept by applying hydrochloric acid to a nylon canvas with a special paintbrush, causing it to shred.

“I was very aggressive putting the acid onto that nylon,” he told Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, which organized a five-decade retrospective of his work in 2009. “It was partly me attacking the system of capitalism, but inevitably also the systems of war, the warmongers, and destroying them in a sense symbolically.”