Some painters just disappear from the radar screen through no fault of their own.

The paintings of the German Jewish émigré painter Martin Bloch, who died in 1954, were last seen together in any number almost a quarter of a century ago. Then, as now, the brilliance of their colour, and the way that colour itself seemed to be at the very root of the painting’s making, almost its reason for being, was a revelation. Since then, his name has been almost entirely forgotten.

A new exhibition of his work at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich gives us an opportunity to reassess the work of a man who arrived in London from Nazi Germany in 1934, and over a period of 20 years not only produced a body of work that helped to reinvigorate English painting, but also, through his teaching, injected European ideas into an art-school system that was drearily insular in the extreme.

Bloch gave us a dose of an invigorating tonic of European Modernism of the kind that he had learnt first-hand in Paris and Berlin during a career that had begun to take shape in the 1920s.

During the great Jewish diaspora of the 1930s, hundreds of artists, writers and scientists fled Nazi Germany. Many went to the US. Others — Kurt Schwitters, for example — came to Britain. When the German Jewish painter Martin Bloch arrived in London in 1934, the city was not at all as he had imagined it would be. Where was the greyness, the colourlessness, the fog? Instead, what he saw were brilliant pin pricks of colour — the red telephone box; the Route-master buses.

Bloch had just arrived, with his wife, from a small island off the coast of Denmark. It was a place to which German Jewish émigrés could escape — Bloch’s escape had been engineered by a member of the Berlin PEN club. Others on that island included Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who were seen there by Bloch’s wife, playing Monopoly together, in 1933. Bloch’s earliest works in the show pay extravagant homage to Matisse and the Fauves. He is captivated by the sheer power of colour — the composition and even the choice of colours in Studio Interior (1914) is uncannily similar to Matisse’s Red Room.

During the 1920s he made countless visits to Spain and Italy. In spite of the fact that the influences of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin are very much present, the work is maturing now — he chooses a single palette of colours

and sticks to it; the paintings are much more artfully composed and harmonious.

One work of 1930 in particular, Italian Butcher’s Shop, seems to be full of political foreboding — a thin figure, observed by a dog, is framed in the window of a butcher’s shop. An image of Mussolini — part medallion, part ghoulish mask — hangs on an exterior wall. This painting is one of Bloch’s rare moments of direct entanglement with politics. The last works he makes in Berlin, in the early 1930s, are full of tension — acidic, intense, and tight in their style of drawing.

London brings that paradoxical breath of fresh air. There is so much energy and curiosity here, so much light and life. All Souls and the BBC (Langham Place) is rich and thick — almost ice-creamy — in its surprising use of a range of delicate pinks. A little later, during the Second World War, he is given permission to paint the destruction of London. He paints the skeletal roofs of Kensington after a fire raid rising into a terribly smoky yellow sky and the heavy, dust-filled air.

Bloch was invited to teach at Camberwell College of Art in 1948. It was a period when the teaching of students ran along bleakly orthodox tramlines. First of all, set the overall tonality — this was likely to be various shades of grey. Then measure everything up so that all the proportions were just so.

Bloch threw this Euston Road text-book model out of the window. His message was all about colour — choose a dominant colour for the painting; let colour itself dictate form. These were revolutionary words, and many of his former students remember them to this day — for proof of that, see the various statements at the back of the excellent catalogue which accompanies the show.

After the war Bloch’s own work seems to enter a new country of the mind — and of the brush. He turns away from people and buildings to trees and landscape. He is in pursuit of the essence of places — Dorset, Wales. He is almost a tree-hugger. One of the greatest paintings of this period is Blackmore Vale against the Sun (1946). The entire scene seems to hum with rich, dense, heavy clottings of colour. He has tossed aside finicky detail to render direct experience, to capture some Joycean moment of epiphany.

Unlike in the earlier works, there is also much evidence of the painter busy about the surface of the canvas, dabbing on, scraping off. Statements are left hanging. The works feel open-ended, almost unresolved.

Bloch died when his grandson, Peter Rossiter, was just 4 years old. It is Rossiter who has assembled this exhibition of 67 paintings and almost 30 drawings so as to rescue the reputation of his grandfather from the near oblivion that fickle fashion sometimes dictates.

I remark on the religious feel of these late paintings. “No, he was not a religious man,” Rossiter says, “and in some ways he was something of a reactionary. He believed, for example, that a work of art should be an object of beauty, and not, as so many of the moderns have felt, that it should be an anguished expression of personal alienation. I think that sets him apart. I think it links him with the painters he most revered, El Greco and Velázquez, for example.”

Martin Bloch is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich (01603 593199), until April 15