“Often when people say this sort of thing, it’s masking something else. In Ronald’s case, it’s true,” said Carter, who partnered with Perelman to reopen the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “He has learned to love and appreciate the bourgeois comforts of family and home.”

Carter described Perelman as a “charismatic swashbuckler” who once enjoyed evenings on the New York social circle a little too much. But he said Perelman is now “crazy about spending time at home” with his fifth wife Anna, a psychiatrist, and their two young sons.

Richard Hack, who wrote a 1996 unauthorized biography of Perelman, is skeptical.

“If you want a simpler life, you go buy a farm in Oklahoma, not sell a painting out of your townhouse in Manhattan,” Hack said. “If he’s selling his art, it’s because he needs cash.”

The art includes Jasper Johns’s “0 Through 9,” priced in the $70 million-range, Gerhard Richter’s “Zwei Kerzen (Two Candles),” which went for more than $50 million and Cy Twombly’s “Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (I),” which found a buyer for about $20 million, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified as the sales were private.

“What he’s selling is as blue chip as it gets,” said Wendy Goldsmith, an art adviser in London.

Some proceeds are slated to pay down loans from Citigroup Inc., according to people with knowledge of the arrangements. He also has loans from JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and UBS Group AG related to his artwork, filings show.

These are not forced sales, said a spokeswoman for Perelman. She also denied a New York Post story that “The Creeks,” his 57-acre East Hampton estate, is being discretely marketed and said that he remains committed to his considerable philanthropy. Perelman is building a performing arts center in the Financial District, is vice chairman of the Apollo Theater, and sits on the boards of Columbia Business School and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

It’s a striking turn for Perelman, long celebrated and feared for engineering some of the most ambitious deals of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and for the litigation, divorces and corporate brawls he left in his wake.

“He was imaginative, aggressive and innovative in ways that changed the financial landscape,” said investment banker Ken Moelis, a long-time Perelman adviser.