Be modern
collectors, museums
if you have old paintings
do not despair
Retain your memories
but detourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush.
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over
You might as well finish it off
Detourn (détournez)
Long live painting.

On his Détournements, modifications of old, existing paintings, in the foreword to the catalogue of his exhibition Modifications (1959)