Just when it looked as if some in the crowd at Christie’s might nod off during a slow-going — albeit solid — auction of Impressionist and Modern works Monday evening, a bronze female head by Constantin Brancusi injected a powerful dose of excitement into the proceedings. The work sold for $57.4 million with fees after nine minutes of vigorous competition from at least five bidders in the room and on the phones.

The head was quickly rumored to have been sold to the media mogul David Geffen over the phone, although the art adviser who won the lot, Tobias Meyer, declined to comment on his way out of the auction room and Mr. Geffen, reached by phone, said he was not the buyer.

“It was a fantastic piece,” Nicholas Maclean, a dealer, said afterward. “It’s one of the great subjects, was an early cast and was in extraordinary condition. They just never come up for sale.”

The auction, which kicked off this week of spring sales in New York, was respectable despite the room’s low energy (perhaps in part because of the deliberative auctioneer), raising a total of $289.2 million with 78 percent of the 55 lots sold.