Samir Rafi’s Life’s Tragedy is a painting produced in 1949, shortly after establishment of the Contemporary Art Group by artist and educator Husayn Youssef Amin and Kamal Youssef. The group, which included artists like Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar and Hamed Nada, sprang from an anti-colonial nationalist consciousness, and was inspired by folk symbolism, often depicting the working class and urban life. This trend in realism was joined by the writer Albert Cossery and others, for whom Rafi and his contemporaries were producing illustrations for literary magazines. This painting is one of many belonging to a new milieu of social criticism and story-telling. The recumbent figure appears deceased or near death with an attendant, or perhaps a family member, bringing what appears to be an empty bowl. Looming sense of death is emphatically represented by the precarious placement of a rectangular grave in the wooden floor at the figure’s bedside.

Rafi’s first exhibit with the Egyptian Surrealist group Art et Liberté was in 1943 when he was only 17. A graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Cairo he earned a Ph.D. in art history at the Sorbonne in Paris and later returned to work as a Professor at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, writing several influential texts that included one on the influence of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution on art in Egypt.