As art historians have noted, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) occupies a very special place in the history of Western painting, both as the harbinger of 20th century modernism and as the progenitor of Cubism. For these reasons, as also for its convoluted history and multivariate interpretations, there is a vast art-historical literature on the painting. Yet creativity researchers have scarcely showed any interest in it as a creative phenomenon. This neglect is all the more striking once one realizes how the painting affords a veritable laboratory for exploring the nature of the complexity of creativity. Using the cognitive-historical approach this paper seeks to illuminate the complexity of the process by which Les Demoiselles d’Avignon came into being. In particular, it shows how the integrative actions of such cognitive processes as goal generation and structuring, purposive evolution, directed search through problem spaces, schema generation and elaboration, knowledge search, and cognitive identification, combined with elements of Picasso’s cultural-historical milieu, and the knowledge-based interpretative judgment of later consumers of the painting shed light on the complexity of its creation.

正如艺术史学家所指出的那样，阿维尼翁大帝（Les Demoiselles d'Avignon，1907年）在西方绘画史上占有非常特殊的地位，既是20世纪现代主义的先驱者，也是立体主义的祖先。由于这些原因，还有令人费解的历史和多样的解释，这幅画上有大量的艺术史文献。然而，创造力研究人员几乎没有表现出对作为创造现象的兴趣。一旦意识到这幅画如何为探索创造力复杂性的本质提供一个名副其实的实验室，这一忽视就变得更加惊人。本文使用认知历史方法试图阐明《阿维尼翁女神》的创作过程的复杂性。应运而生。特别是，它展示了诸如目标生成和结构化，目的性进化，通过问题空间的定向搜索，图式生成和阐述，知识搜索和认知识别等认知过程的整合动作，以及毕加索的文化历史环境元素，后来的绘画使用者基于知识的解释性判断，揭示了其创作的复杂性。