Seeking Asylum in Paris

From the Written Memoir by Jas Elsner: To be granted international asylum in Paris, he needed some kind of accreditation that showed him to be a sufficiently promising painter to be allowed to stay. So he went to see the famous Polish sculptor, Zadkine, who had been settled in France for many years and had a big name. He always had a soft spot for Zadkine (whose work still figures in museum displays of modernist sculpture) and insisted on showing me his pieces in the Pompidou Centre during the first trip on which he took me to Paris. The sculptor looked at his portfolio and made several ironic comments about Kraków being much more modern than Paris, but he signed the necessary document anyway.