I was watching a documentary on Egon Schiele when this drawing appeared briefly on the screen. Most of the film focused on his more provocative work—his contorted self-portraits, his depictions of young models, his obsession with the body’s vulnerability and erotic charge. Then, almost in passing, came Russian War Prisoner. The film continued. I paused it.
There was something in the man’s face that stopped me. His eyes were alive with suspicion or perhaps fatigue. His cheeks were bruised with color. His uniform sagged under the weight of unspoken experiences. He looked back at me not as a historical figure or an artistic subject but as a person. That immediacy held me in place.
Unlike so many of Schiele’s subjects, this man is not abstracted into metaphor. He is not exaggerated into some symbol of desire, death, or existential dread. He is a Russian soldier, a prisoner of war held during the First World War. Schiele, serving as a guard at the time, could have chosen to see him only as a category: enemy, foreigner, threat. Instead, he rendered the man with quiet empathy. The figure is drawn with expressive precision, but there is no theatricality in the posture. The man’s medals are slightly crooked. His hand droops. His lips are chapped. His gaze holds. The drawing refuses to turn him into anything other than himself.
That refusal feels radical in any age, but especially in wartime. To portray the enemy as human is to resist the machinery of propaganda, which depends on simplifying others into ideas, into threats, into causes for which we can kill or be killed. We are trained to fear what is foreign, to dismiss what is different, to view cultures, religions, and nations outside our own through a lens of suspicion. The process is often subtle, reinforced by repetition and rhetoric, but its effect is powerful. We begin to see not people, but categories. Not faces, but masks.
Art like Russian War Prisoner interrupts that process. It refuses to let the viewer remain comfortably distant. It reasserts the presence of the individual within systems that would erase him. The longer I sit with this drawing, the more I recognize how many assumptions I carry—how many people I pass over in daily life, seeing only a sliver of who they are. Schiele’s work reminds me that each person I encounter, whether across a border, across a belief system, or across a grocery aisle, contains a story I cannot fully know. The human face is never a reliable map of experience, but it is a place where empathy can begin.
This drawing has changed the way I think about the power of representation. We often speak of art as a mirror, but sometimes it functions more as a window—a way of seeing not ourselves, but others, with more honesty. And in seeing others, we are forced to reexamine ourselves. What do I see when I look into this soldier’s face? What fears or preconceptions do I carry into that gaze? And what might it cost me to let those things go?
It breaks my heart that this work lives in a collection I may never visit. I want to stand before it, to trace the delicate pencil lines with my eyes, to see the real scale of the paper and the weight of the hand that made it. At the same time, I am grateful that it is visible to me at all. Even mediated through a screen, even flattened by digital light, the drawing reaches across time and geography to remind me of what is most important.
Among Schiele’s body of work, Russian War Prisoner stands apart not only for its stylistic restraint but for its moral clarity. It does not scream. It does not indict. It simply remembers. And that remembering becomes a form of resistance—against propaganda, against erasure, against the human tendency to define others by their distance from ourselves.