The exhibition at Zachęta was a big show of contemporary French architecture and the applied arts. Since the second half of the 1950s, cultural exchange between France and Poland had gradually intensified, which manifested itself in state-supported exhibitions. The curator of Forms was a famous interior and furniture designer, René Herbst, a co-founder of the French Union of Modern Artists (L’Union des artistes modernes, UAM) established in 1929, and from 1950 to 1966, head of Formes utiles, a UAM section dedicated to industrial design.