Composed in 1933, only months before George Antheil and countless other expatriate artists were forced to flee France as Hitler's shadow approached, La Femme 100 Têtes represents a brief reemergence of Antheil's raucous early style. La Femme is an odd set of 45 short preludes inspired by a book of etchings compiled by the artist Max Ernst. A noted surrealist painter, Ernst collected etchings from nineteenth-century storybooks, combined them into curious collages, provided each with an eerie caption, and published the results under the title Antheil later used for his piano work. Each of Antheil's preludes, which corresponds to a selection from Ernst's collection, is an often witty character study, full of the unpredictable harmonic twists and exaggerated rhythmic gestures that characterized his riotous piano works of the previous decade. From the 1930s on, Antheil generally moderated his earlier, more radical style and increasingly came under the influence of Stravinskian neoclassicism and the emerging "Americana" style of composers such as Aaron Copland and Roy Harris.

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