John Jones

An inspired teacher his former students include the artist Patrick Hughes, the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, the art historian and curator John Elderfield and the film-maker and biographer Timothy Neat.

He was born in Winterbourne and educated at Colton School in Bristol, but his art school education was interrupted by the Second World War, during which time he served with the Royal Engineers. He returned to complete his diploma at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and then attended the Slade School of Art, under the painter William Coldstream.

After marrying his wife Gaby, whom he met in London, then married in Montevideo, they lived for three years in Buenos Aires. There he did some art-work, mainly making jewellery.

His wife's family were originally from Berlin but fled the Nazis and settled in Buenos Aires. She is the niece of the art historian Rudolph Wittkower.

After a period in the Argentine capital he moved to Leeds, working at the James Graham College before his appointment, in 1962, as a lecturer in the Fine Art department at Leeds University. With the support of the then professor Quentin Bell, Mr Jones took charge of the studio-based aspect of a course which gave equal weight to academic and practical endeavour – an innovation at that time.

In 1965-66, he spent a sabbatical year travelling in the US. He interviewed 100 American artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, and a young Japanese artist of the time, Yoko Ono, using the tapes of these encounters in subsequent lectures.

A year later when Yoko Ono held an event at Leeds College of Art, Mr Jones invited her to stay at his house in Headingley. This was shortly before her first meeting with John Lennon and, 20 years later, Mr Jones was asked to write about it for a book on the life of the former Beatle called The Lennon Companion: Twenty Five Years of Comment.

Mr Jones was one of a group of talented artists, scholars and writers associated with the Gregory fellowships at the university and the ground-breaking courses at Leeds College of Art, under the leadership of Harry Thubron. In those years Leeds gained its reputation as a centre for an art education based on modernist principles.

On his retirement from the Fine Art department, Mr Jones continued to lecture in the communications department until, in 1995, a stroke ended his teaching career.

Exhibitions of his paintings were held, among other places, in the University Gallery, Park Square Gallery, in Leeds, and, along with the ceramics of Quentin Bell, in Harrogate.

He was chairman of the O- and A-level examinations panel of London University, a member of the International Arts Association and one of the founders of the Leeds Art Fair.

His taste as a collector was both discerning and wide-ranging, including Victorian optical toys, magic lantern slides – he was at one time chairman of the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain- and the work of James Joyce. His collection of stereoscopic views gave rise to his book Wonders of the Stereoscope published in 1976. Objects from his collection are now in the National Museum of Film and television, in Bradford.

A man of great charm, an exceptional raconteur, "wont to set the table on a roar", his enthusiasm for art and life in general survived serious health problems, dating back several decades.

He is survived by his wife Gaby, and his daughters Rachel and Nicolette.