Schnabel uses palimpsests of thickly applied wax and oil paint to create striking crags and vast ravines of material on the surface of the canvas, exaggerating the topography of the painting and amplifying its physical presence. Lazarus, Second Painting for Aldo Moro, whose title references the assassinated Italian Prime Minister, strikes the viewer with the same athletic impasto and emotional gravity that distinguished the work of both Chaim Soutine and Willem de Kooning, artists with whom Schnabel feels a personal affinity and who have served as important historical precedents for the contemporary painter’s own work.
As Constance Lewallen wrote on the ocassion of the work's inclusion in the Berkeley Art Museum's Julian Schnabel exhibition in 1982, "Always concerned with surfaces, Schnabel's works of the mid- and late seventies are characterized by a buildup of oil, wax and plaster, influenced by Johns and Brice Marden. Lazarus (Second Painting for Aldo Moro) and Born in 1951 (St. Sebastian) from this group also demonstrate Schnabel's penchant for disrupting the two-dimensional plane of his paintings, here with gouges and ridges, which are then, like the broken plates in later works, painted upon as if they were not there, daring the viewer to ignore their presence" (Constance Lewallen, Julian Schnabel / MATRIX 52, exh. brochure, Berkeley Art Museum, May 15, 1982 - July 31, 1982, online).