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Indiana lives now in what he calls a kind of exile. But in the mid-1950s, he had an appetite for the hum and buzz of the New York art scene. He eventually even changed his name from Clark, so he'd stand out.

"There were a number of artists named Clark," he recalls. "And if you look in the telephone book, there are thousands and thousands of people named Clark."

But not so many Indianas — a name he took in honor of his home state.

You could say that the artist is a bit of a sentimentalist: He mines his autobiography for everything he does, even LOVE. The inspiration came from his childhood as a Christian Scientist, when the phrase "God is love" was prominent. Indiana inverted the idea to suggest that "Love is God."

Even the colors in that famous painting come from the artist's childhood.

"The red and the green came from the Philips 66 gas sign," says Martin Krause, a curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. "His father worked for Philips 66, and he remembered that combination; it fixed itself in his mind. And when he began making the LOVE paintings in 1965, his father died. So the red and green of the [MOMA] LOVE painting, silhouetted against the blue Indiana sky, is in memoriam of his father."

At the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, two images of Indiana's parents open a show called "Robert Indiana: Beyond Love" – the first career-spanning retrospective for the artist. Unlike his usually bright, colorful paintings, these are in grays, with his parents standing in front of a Model T Ford. In one image, the couple is dressed; in the other, Indiana's mother reveals her breasts.

"What we wanted the show to do was suggest the range and breadth of Bob Indiana's work," says curator Barbara Haskell, who organized the show as a kind of corrective.

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