Ash Wednesday falls this year on March 6. During the first four weeks of Lent, I will be featuring prints from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection depicting the Agony in the Garden, when Christ prayed in Gethsemane for the cup of his suffering to pass. A trio of works by artists from the German-speaking world all display the distortion of form for dramatic effect typical of the Expressionist movement that originated in Germany in the opening years of the 20th century. Seeming to shred the air with clawlike hands, Christ lurches forward in horror from his place of prayer in a jagged-lined woodcut (left) by German Graphic Artist Hermann Dienz for a cycle of images on the Passion of Christ, printed in Berlin in 1922. In the same year, Austrian Printmaker Elfriede Miller Haufelfels made an equally dramatic woodblock print for a Viennese fine arts journal, where the oddly angled rock where Christ prays seems to merge earth with heaven. The third new image of Jesus in Gethsemane on The Prayer in the Garden page of The Passion of Christ gallery in The Life of Christ section was created almost four decades later by German Early Modernist Otto Dix for a special edition of the Gospel of Matthew. The bold linework in this caricatured image of a demonic form overshadowing the praying Christ firmly roots it in the Expressionist tradition. We cross the border into the Netherlands for a fourth print of the Agony in the Garden by Dutch Artist Lodewijk Schelfhout, also dating from the 1920s, which is the subject of a meditation on the slumbering disciples to be found in the Art Reflections gallery of the Moments with Masters section. (John Kohan)