Kahlo's Painting 'I Only Gave Her A Few Small Nips'

“I Only Gave Her A Few Small Nips”
In Schirmer’s Visual Library Frida Kahlo’s Masterpieces there is an interesting painting. The painting is one of Frida’s most bloody and gory painting. The social message that I inferred from the painting was the brutality against women in Mexican society. Mexican culture has been in part defined by machismo an intense strain of masculinity. Mexican men have been expected to be authoritarian, aggressive, and promiscuous. Kahlo forces the viewer to examine this extreme violence, and forces the spectator to deal with Mexican culture and values of gender roles. In this paper I will be giving a detailed explanation of Kahlo’s painting to illuminate why I believe her painting is conveying a social message
of brutality.
Kahlo’s painting was composed in 1935, she read in a newspaper about a man who had murdered his girlfriend. Then he was taken before the judge, he simply said “but I only gave her a few small nips.” Kahlo read this newspaper article at the time and thought it was funny and horrible at the same time. Kahlo said she needed to paint this painting, she herself felt “murdered by life”, she reflected her misery onto another woman’s calamity. When Diego had an ongoing year-long love affair with Kahlo’s sister Cristina, Kahlo had emotional feelings of abandonment, jealousy, betrayal, and love. These emotions all coincided to create not just a real life portrait of an event but the echoed feelings was the moment where her painting became the bloodiest she ever did. What immediately interested me in the painting was the frame. She carried the blood all the way onto the frame so that it almost implicates the viewer in this murder scene. But she also had stabbed the frame with a knife and there is these gauge marks down below. Although you cannot really see in the photographs, she was livid this painting is really about brutality against women in Mexican society.
This is one of Kahlo’s paintings that forces the viewer to examine the lower role of women in Mexican society and culture.
It illustrates how they are continually abused by these “small nips” by the men. This painting has a man standing over his girlfriend with a knife in his hand. This conveys that the women get beat by men, and as time passes by these small abuses leave the woman tortured and weak. By forcing the viewer to examine this extreme violence, Kahlo forces the spectator to deal with Mexican Culture values of gender roles. What in this painting made me draw that conclusion? There are a few symbols. One symbol is the naked, bloodied woman laying on her death bed, beneath her dagger- wielding murderer. This woman is wearing one single high-heeled shoe, one fancy lace garter, and a fallen stocking worn. The inference I drew from the first glance is that there is a “fallen woman.” The way her body is positioned, and the way her upper and lower body twist in opposite directions. Also another symbol is the position of the room of the painting. It almost feels like it is cornered by its violence: walls press the bloody bed toward us and one bed leg is cut off by the lower edge of the painting, there is no way to hide the disaster of domestic
violence. I believe the value of Kahlo’s work is to encourage women to be careful, and not to easily trust anyone. The man in the picture is fully dressed with a small smirk on his face. That smirk is the true horror of the piece. The fact that the woman is completely nude, while the man is fully dressed is also a point of concern. This signifies that the woman trusted the man to get fully undressed, while the man kept his secrets, his disguise as a killer, on. You don’t always know the people you associate with, until it turn to something horrific. In this painting Kahlo wanted the nation to finally know the brutality that was going on in her hometown. The painting also communicates as a national identity for Mexico, in showing the reality of everyday life in such an awful scene, but all too real; however, for Kahlo in creating this work was not only for her own emotions, but for the identity of the murdered woman. To give her justice in allowing for the spectator to deal with Mexican culture gender roles.
When it comes to the inspiration behind the painting, she explores the common struggles of a Mexican woman in a society that shuts women out. “Explicitly indicates that infidelity precipitated the murder.” The repetition of trauma is precisely why this painting is such an important piece of work in Kahlo’s collection. She painted it intended that such an event would not emerge again. The focus on trauma is legitimate where viewers become aware of the violence.

Works Cited
Lindauer, Margaret A. Devouring Frida: The art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. Print.
Sayers, Jentery. “The Revolutionary Artist: Frida Kahlo” UW 's Dept. of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Unknown. 5/3/2014. Url:http://courses.washington.edu/femart/final_project/wordpress/frida-kahlo/
Schirmer, Mosel. Frida Kahlo Masterpieces. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. Print.