The French government yesterday returned a painting by Max Pechstein to the heirs of Hugo Simon, a Jewish banker and art collector who fled Berlin for France weeks after the Nazis came to power in 1933 and later emigrated to Brazil.The 1912 painting of four nudes in a wooded landscape, which was in the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris, was identified as Simon’s property thanks to a label on the back which showed he had loaned it to a 1938 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London. Researchers have been unable to trace its exact trajectory from there, since the work does not appear on the lists of plundered art kept by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi unit in charge of appropriating cultural property in occupied territories.But France’s commission to compensate the victims of Nazi looting, known by the acronym CIVS, said there was no room for doubt that it was looted. At a ceremony at the French culture ministry, the government yesterday handed the painting to Simon’s heirs, represented by his great-grandson Rafael Cardoso, an art historian based in Berlin.