The Neue Galerie of New York has reached a restitution settlement for “Nude,” a 1914 painting by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, with the heirs of a Jewish shoe manufacturer and art collector whose artworks were taken when his wife and son were forced to flee Germany by the Nazis in the 1930s, the museum announced Tuesday.

The museum said it had returned the painting to the family of Alfred and Tekla Hess and then bought it back at its current fair market value. No price was given for the repurchase of the painting, which the Neue Galerie bought at auction in 1999, but other works by the artist have recently sold for more than $1 million.

The Neue Galerie, a museum in Manhattan that focuses on art created in Austria and Germany from 1890 to 1940, was co-founded by Ronald S. Lauder in 2001, largely from art donated from his collection and from that of his friend, Serge Sabarsky, an art dealer and expert on German and Austrian Expressionist art who died in 1996.

Mr. Lauder, an heir to the cosmetics fortune of his mother, Estée Lauder, has championed the restitution of art plundered in Europe during World War II and is working to get legislation on the issue through Congress. He is chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery, which negotiates with governments, museums and other entities to retrieve art wrongfully taken from Jews by the Third Reich and its allies.