In the late 1950s, on moving to Paris, the Indian artist and printmaker Krishna Reddy, who has died aged 93, found himself in the heart of bohemian society. “There was one tiny little street,” Reddy recalled, “in which all the great artists gathered.” He regularly met Alberto Giacometti, and would look in on Constantin Brâncuşi every Sunday. In the cafes of Montparnasse, Reddy would discuss how the spiritualism he had learned from his first teacher, the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, had blended with European modernism. Underpinning his ideas was a technical knowhow that produced several innovations in the medium Reddy made his own.

Reddy joined Atelier 17, the Parisian studio of a fellow printmaker, Stanley William Hayter, and together they developed “viscosity printing”, in which multiple colours can be applied to the same metal printing plate, each paint mixed to a different thickness with linseed oil so that it does not contaminate the others. Whirlpool, a work from 1963 held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is typical in its frantic composition of discrete blues.

His accomplishment as a printmaker, which could be seen in a 2016 show at the Met, led naturally into an equally successful career as a teacher, in particular through his establishment in 1976 of Color Print Atelier, a studio at New York University (NYU), and invitations to hold workshops from over 250 institutions globally.

Born to Nandanoor and Lakshmamma Reddy, agricultural workers, in a village on the outskirts of Chittoor in the state of Andhra Pradesh, Krishna could hardly read or write until the age of 11 and yet expressed a prodigious talent for art. Copying the mythological paintings of south Indian gods and goddesses, and inspired by Nandanoor, who made sculptures for the local temple, from the age of six the boy would paint murals.

Krishna Reddy with his 1962 sculpture To a New Form. Photograph: Experimenter

He attended Rishi Valley school, established in nearby Madanapalle by Krishnamurti. Radically egalitarian in respect of caste, gender and religion, the school was raided in 1941, the colonial authorities seizing Marxist books and literature promoting independence. Krishna became vocal in his support of the Quit India Movement and was beaten on several occasions while protesting. In 1943, aged 16, he was sent by his parents to Santiniketan in West Bengal, where he studied at the art college founded by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore at the Visva-Bharati University. Their hopes that the move north would keep him out of trouble were frustrated: having volunteered to clear the streets of bodies during the Bengal famine of 1943, Reddy’s leftwing politics sharpened.

In 1949, after three further years of study in Chennai (then Madras), and with the help of his old teacher Krishnamurti, Reddy attended the Slade in London. There he took classes with Henry Moore and Lucian Freud, before he received a scholarship in 1951 to be apprenticed to the Russian artist Ossip Zadkine in Paris.

Soon afterwards he joined Atelier 17, and became its co-director in 1965. He produced posters in support of the Algerian revolution – which led to his being interrogated by the French police on several occasions – and witnessed the student uprisings of May 1968, a seismic event he documented in Demonstrators, a rare figurative series of prints and bronzes. Nature also fascinated him. Butterflies, trees, waves, spiders’ webs and blossom were frequent subjects, depicted in dream-like compositions that take their cue from abstraction and surrealism.

Krishna Reddy in 2011 in his studio, lined with tools. Photograph: Ram Rahman

Throughout his time in France Reddy made repeated trips across the Atlantic, initially with his first wife, Shirley Witebsky, an artist with whom he exhibited at the first International Sculpture Symposium in Montreal in 1964, and then, after Shirley’s death in 1966, with the artist Judy Blum, whom he married the following year, to teach classes at the American University, Washington DC, and the University of Wisconsin.

In 1976 the couple moved to New York. There, after establishing the Color Print Atelier, Reddy became director of graphics and printmaking in the art department at NYU, a post he held until 2002. Krishna and Judy lived on Wooster Street, in the space where George Maciunas and Yoko Ono had previously established the Fluxus collective. His studio, lined with hundreds of tools and piled high with printing plates, became a haven for young artists from all round the world, especially those new to the US.

In 1981 the Bronx Museum held a retrospective of his work, which toured various museums in India. The Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City staged another survey in 1988, the year in which Reddy published his first book, the practical guide Intaglio Simultaneous Color Printmaking: Significance of Materials and Processes. The publication emerged from the classes Reddy was by then teaching at museums and schools across the US, Europe and Asia.

Regular commercial shows took place throughout the 90s, and in 2000 the British Museum acquired a cache of prints by Reddy. Tate Britain and the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi also own his work.

Reddy is survived by Judy and their daughter, Aparna.

• Krishna Reddy, artist, born 15 July 1925; died 22 August 2018

• This article was amended on 5 September 2018. An incorrect location was given for Atelier 17.