Klaus G. Perls, who sold art for more than 60 years at the Perls Galleries and donated an important collection of African royal art from Benin and modern works by Picasso and Modigliani valued at more than $60 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died on Monday in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 96 and lived in Armonk, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Katherine Perls, of Cambridge, Mass.

For six decades Mr. Perls ran the Perls Galleries with his wife, Amelia, better known as Dolly, who died in 2002.

The couple dealt primarily in modern works from the School of Paris, but also represented Alexander Calder beginning in 1954. In the 1970s Mr. Perls developed an interest in art from Benin and built an important collection.

In 1991 the Perlses gave 153 pieces of African royal art from Benin, which are in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Met. Those included bronze figures, elephant tusks carved with royal figures, musical instruments, decorative masks and jewelry.

In 1996 they gave the Met 13 works by Picasso, Modigliani, Braque, Léger, Soutine and Pascin. That gift was one of the largest ever received by the Met’s department of 20th-century art and greatly helped round out the museum’s collection.

“Cubism has been one of our great gaps,” Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s director, said at the time. “Now we have three masterpieces.”

Two were from 1910, Picasso’s “Nude in an Armchair” and Braque’s oval “Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table,” and the third was Picasso’s “Still Life With Pipes” from 1912.

The gift also included several Picassos from the 1930s, notably “Sleeping Nude With Flowers” and “Girl Asleep at a Table.”

“When I started out these works were considered very modern,” Mr. Perls said. “In the 1930s you couldn’t sell them because people thought they were too avant-garde. But I believe these are among the best paintings Picasso ever did.”

In a marked departure from the practice of many donors, Mr. Perls placed no restrictions on the way the works should be exhibited.

“I don’t like the idea of museums being forced to hang things a certain way,” he said. “I think it’s pretentious. The Met has a fine collection already and if these pieces help and in some way upgrade it, that’s all I want.”

Klaus Perls was born in Berlin, where his parents dealt in art. He studied art history in Munich, but after the Nazis stopped granting degrees to Jews he completed his studies in Basel, Switzerland, writing a dissertation on the 15th-century French painter Jean Fouquet.

His parents, in the meantime, had fled Germany; they went their separate ways, his mother setting up as an art dealer in Paris.

In 1935, after two years in Paris, Mr. Perls found his way to New York and opened the Perls Galleries on East 58th Street near Madison Avenue.

Initially, he dealt in works by Maurice Utrillo, Maurice de Vlaminck and Raoul Dufy that his mother sent from Paris. When she was forced to flee France, he began dealing in contemporary American artists, including Darrel Austin, and in Mexican and South American art.

In 1940 he married Amelia Blumenthal, and she became a partner in the gallery. In addition to their daughter, Mr. Perls is survived by three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. His son, Nick, died in 1987.

After the war, the Perlses focused on French art from the School of Paris.

In 1954 they moved their gallery to a town house at 1016 Madison Avenue, near 78th Street, where they lived on the upper floors. There they did business until 1997.

In addition to preparing monographs on Fouquet, Vlaminck and Rufino Tamayo, Mr. Perls wrote catalogues raisonnés for the artists Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin.

He also wrote an impassioned letter to The New York Times in 1939, defending the representational work by Picasso that was then being savaged by critics of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

“If the public would take the trouble to spend as much time in the presence of Picasso’s art as they spend in the presence of good music, they would come to like it just as much,” he wrote.

His argument turned out to be correct. The evidence, contributed by Mr. Perls and his wife, hangs on the walls of the Met.