Holz pioneered modernism, was the most important author and theorist of naturalism ("Art, its Essence and its Laws").
Together with the playwright Johannes Schlaf he founded the naturalistic narrative art ("Papa Hamlet"). The socially critical drama "Die Familie Selicke" (The Selicke Family) (1890) surpassed Gerhart Hauptmann in its accuracy of depiction and characterisation of the characters by using the Berlin dialect.
Holz saw himself as a metropolitan poet. Nevertheless, the nature pictures of his long poem "Phantasus" are reminiscent of East Prussian landscapes. The unrhymed, decade-long work about a poor attic poet was graphically set in an original way.
It was not until the 1920s that Holz gained wider recognition.
Illustration:
Arno Holz, photography around 1913