Reflecting from his small town of Drohobycz in the Polish borderlands in 1936, the draughtsman and writer Bruno Schulz postulated that “the nameless does not exist for us”, arguing that the essence of reality is meaning. Schulz asserted that poetry and art provide us with short-circuits of meaning that create a sudden regeneration of an “integral mythology” that acts against semiotic ossification. The wider creative process of mythologising reality is a prism for understanding how modernist artists from Lviv tried to disrupt everyday meanings and language in search of alternate narratives, which in practice often functioned to resist the homogenising social and political forces in Poland and Europe, the rise of authoritarian regimes, and the ongoing economic crises of the 1930s. This paper examines the work of a group of artists from interwar Lviv through Schulz’s concept of mythologizing reality, arguing that crisis and conflict engender new modes of meaning precisely as they destabilize extant structures.

Georges Bataille’s mythmaking project in Acéphale emerged as a symbolic counterforce to the rise of fascism. Bataille’s work constitutes a creative transformation of overwhelming emotion—terror, despair, and political urgency—into new symbolic structures capable of reorganizing consciousness. Myth becomes not a retreat from reality but a site of catharsis and conceptual reconfiguration. Through the landscape of action, Prometheus operates as a narrative of rebellion, creation, and sacrificial risk. Through the landscape of consciousness, the myth articulates sacred transgression, affective excess, and existential intensity. Rather than a stable story, Bataille’s Prometheus is a volatile symbolic practice whose instability is central to its anti-fascist force. This paper argues that mythic imagery, mobilized in moments of historical danger, becomes a theoretical tool: a way of thinking, feeling, and resisting when ordinary language fails.

Peter Howson’s appointment as the official British war artist during the Bosnian conflict marked a radical shift away from traditions of military heroism toward what critics have called “moral realism.” His works do not distance the viewer from war; they insist on confrontation by depicting (directly and indirectly) the suffering of Bosnian civilians. Using a Vygotskian lens, Howson’s paintings can be read as creative acts that transform overwhelming emotion into symbolic form, thick impasto surfaces ,and contorted bodies functioning as the material resolution of psychic tension. Viewed through the prism of Bruner’s theory, the landscape of action is used by Howson to render scenes of violence, displacement, and forced passivity. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, the landscape of consciousness mobilizes affective intensities that pull the viewer into a shared moral and psychological space, which is perhaps the most significant contribution of Howson’s creative output. As illustrated by a number of Howson’s works, but here specifically by Cleanser 2, 7th Brigade (1993) and Bon Bon Alley (1994), the recurring figure of a child becomes a symbolic hinge between two landscapes, revealing how art narrates the activities of war while also reorganizing its profound emotional implications.