The patented ultramarine blue pigment "International Klein Blue" was created by Yves Klein in the years 1955-1960 following extensive research: "I sought a fixing medium capable of fixing each pigment grain to each other, and then to the support, without any of them being altered or deprived of their autonomous possibilities of radiation, while at the same time becoming one with the others and with the support, thus creating the colored mass, the pictorial surface".

"The Dying Slave, inspired by Michelangelo's David, was the last work by the artist, who died in 1962. Michelangelo's sculpture, created in 1513, was originally intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, but was eventually dropped from the project in 1542.

The statue was then offered by the artist to Roberto Strozzi and entered the collections of Francis I. After passing through prestigious collections, notably that of Richelieu, it was seized during the French Revolution and entered the collections of the Musée du Louvre in 1792. Based on the canons of Greek Antiquity and Plato's doctrine, Michelangelo depicts a young slave with half-closed eyes, asleep, trying to escape a nightmare.
In 1962, Yves Klein chose it as the setting for his "International Klein Blue" (IKB) pigment: "Blue has no dimensions. It has no dimensions, whereas the other colors do [...] All colors lead to concrete, material or tangible associations of ideas in a psychological way, whereas blue recalls at most the sea and the sky, what is after all most abstract in tangible, visible nature." An icon of the Renaissance with its ancient canons, sublimated by Yves Klein, becomes here an icon of the 20th century.