Formalism, also called Russian Formalism, Russian Russky Formalism, innovative 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky; and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915.
These elements constitute the fundamental language used by formalist art critics to examine and analyze works of art. Whether an artwork is a pure abstraction or representational, a formalist looks for the same basic elements and judges a painting's value based on the artist's ability to achieve a cohesive balance in the composition.