The Kunstakademie began modestly in 1762, when Lambert Krahe opened a drawing school in Dusseldorf. In 1766 it appointed Catharina Treu as its first female professor — a striking move for the 18th century. By 1773 it had become a full academy of painting, sculpture, and architecture under the Elector Palatine. Then Napoleon's wars rearranged the map: when the Wittelsbachs inherited the court's art collection and shipped it to Munich, the Prussian government, freshly in possession of Dusseldorf after Napoleon's defeat, reorganized the school in 1819 as a Royal Arts Academy. By the 1850s it was internationally famous. Students arrived from Scandinavia, Russia, and the United States to learn the meticulous landscape and genre painting that became known as the Dusseldorf school.

The academy's modern reputation was built largely by a man it eventually fired. Joseph Beuys was a sculpture professor here from 1961, and his classroom was an event — felt suits, fat sculptures, philosophical monologues, a coyote, sometimes a hare. In 1972 he refused to accept the school's admission cap and let rejected students enroll anyway. The Education Ministry dismissed him. The legal fight dragged on for years and he eventually settled in 1980 with the right to keep his studio. By then his star pupils — Blinky Palermo, Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorff among them — had begun to reshape European art on his terms, and the idea of teaching as a kind of social sculpture had spread far beyond Dusseldorf.

In 1976, the academy did something unusual: it founded its first dedicated photography class and gave it to Bernd Becher. He and his wife Hilla had spent two decades photographing industrial structures — water towers, blast furnaces, mine heads — in cool, frontal, typological grids. Their teaching produced what the art world now calls the Dusseldorf School of Photography. Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, Axel Hutte, and Elger Esser all came through their classroom. The look — large-format, almost clinical, often monumental in scale — became the dominant register of fine-art photography for a generation. In November 2021 the academy joined the city, the SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne, and the nonprofit DFI to push for a Deutsches Fotoinstitut in Dusseldorf, an institution to anchor the city's claim as a photographic capital.

Gerhard Richter studied here from 1961 to 1963 after fleeing East Germany, and returned as professor of painting from 1971 to 1993 — over two decades training a generation in the slow, skeptical attention his own work demanded. Sigmar Polke arrived around the same time as a student. Together Richter and Polke half-invented what they called Capitalist Realism, a German answer to American Pop. Paul Klee himself taught here, briefly, from 1931 until the Nazis dismissed him in 1933. Later generations brought Markus Lupertz, Jannis Kounellis, Peter Doig, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and Tomma Abts to the faculty. The names change; the building on Eiskellerstrasse, with that carved inscription on its stairs, keeps doing what Lambert Krahe set out to do in 1762.