The model was the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, founded in 1870 - non-denominational, well-respected, far away. The Jan van Eyck Academie was conceived as its Catholic, southern shadow. The compulsory curriculum reflected the mission: history of art, iconography, theology and philosophy, liturgy, sources of Christian art, history of civilization, and literature. The first director, the priest Leo W. Linssen, opened the institute with a speech citing Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece as a model of what 'Christian art' could be. Belgian sculptor Oscar Jespers came on as professor of sculpting in 1949. Architecture was added the same year, on the practical grounds that an applied-art institution restoring churches needed architects too. Studios for ceramics, glass, mosaics, plaster casting, and goldsmithing were set up. The institute moved twice in its first thirteen years - first into a former convent in the Jekerkwartier, then into a 17th-century orphanage on Lenculenstraat - before finally getting a building of its own.

In 1954 the eminent art historian J.J.M. Timmers, director of the Bonnefanten Museum, became the academy's second director. His first job was finding the institute a permanent home. He commissioned the Modernist architect Frits Peutz - Limburg's most celebrated modern architect, the man behind the Glaspaleis in Heerlen - to design a new building. Construction began in June 1959. Staff and students moved in during January 1961. The completed building was only a third of Peutz's original plan, but it gave the academy something it had never had before: purpose-built studios. When the Dutch Minister of Culture Maarten Vrolijk opened a new wing in 1966, he praised the equipment: a metalworking studio, a welding workshop, a carving studio, a bronze foundry, a pottery kiln, facilities for synthetic materials. The institute was no longer a borrowed convent. It was a working art factory.

By the late 1960s the Catholic mission had quietly receded. Society had secularized; the demand for new stained glass and church murals had collapsed. The departments of monumental and applied art closed. The new director Albert Troost and his colleague Ko Sarneel toured art schools across Antwerp, Dusseldorf, and Brussels and came back with a different model. In 1969 they set up departments of theatre, design, and mixed media - deliberately interdisciplinary, refusing to separate sculpture from video from photography from print. By 1978 the institute had reframed itself entirely. It was no longer a place of instruction. It was a 'werkplaats' - a workshop - where works were made and ideas were tested. Students were already starting to be called 'researchers'. In 1980 the Scottish video pioneer Elsa Stansfield arrived to start a Time Based Media Department, the first of its kind in any Dutch postgraduate academy.

By the 1988 fortieth anniversary, English had become the working language and most of the researchers were from outside the Netherlands. Architects Wiel Arets and Wim van den Bergh were asked to translate the new policy plan into architectural terms - they called the concept Macchina Arte, the art-machine. The 1991 policy under director Jan van Toorn formalized three disciplines: fine art, design, and art theory. The 1992 computer workshop and the 1995 internet connection put the academy on the contemporary research map. By the early 2000s, with Koen Brams as director, the institute had a clear identity - a small, well-resourced, internationally networked research lab where artists, designers, and theorists worked alongside each other. Its alumni list includes Mona Hatoum, Steve McQueen (the British artist and filmmaker), Mieke Bal, Sarat Maharaj, Ryan Gander, and Bjarne Melgaard - figures whose work shows up in the Tate, MoMA, and the Venice Biennale.

In March 2013, after a major renovation, director Lex ter Braak restructured the institute under a single umbrella name, 'Van Eyck'. He also gave the academy an unusual gesture toward its own history. Where the institute had been the Jan van Eyck Academie, it became, in parallel, the Margaret van Eyck Academie. The five technical labs received twin names too. The print workshop is now the Charles Nypels Lab / Anne Petronille Nypels Lab. The wood and metal shop is the Heimo Lab / Luzia Hartsuyker-Curjel Lab. The multimedia workshop is the Werner Mantz Lab / Elsa Stansfield Lab. The library is the Pierre Kemp Lab / Therese Cornips Lab. The nature research facility is the Jac. P. Thijsse Lab / Wilhelmina Minis-van de Geijn Lab. The renamings, officially adopted in April and May 2017, were a quiet acknowledgement that the people whose names hang on art-institute doors are almost always men. The teaching arm of the institute, founded in 2012 as the Hubert van Eyck Academie, was paired with a Caterina van Hemessen Academie - after the Flemish Renaissance painter who, in the 1540s, signed a self-portrait at the easel and may be the earliest known artist to depict themselves doing so. Hicham Khalidi took over as director in October 2018. The institute the priest and the architect and the writer imagined in 1928 is still there. It is just no longer recognizably the thing they had in mind.