The record $121m sale of his most famous painting last week sealed the Belgian surrealist’s place in art’s hall of fame. What does it mean for his legacy?

René Magritte painted brain-teasers – an air force of uniformed bureaucrats raining down on to a faceless city, a reverse mermaid with a sardine for her head and human legs, a pair of boots that sport real toes – but even he might have scratched his head if he’d known that last week, after a frenetic bidding war at a New York auction, his Empire of Light had been knocked down for $121m.

“It’s an iconic image,” declared the dealer, Emmanuel Di Donna, uttering an idiotic tautology, although the painting’s subject – a suburban villa beside a canal – looks humdrum enough until you notice that it’s night in the lower half but bright daylight higher up. Rather than accounting for the contradiction, Di Donna reverted to the lucre-loving lingo of the art market and attributed the record price to “the brand recognition of Magritte”.