Hopefully someone on the SDope can provide the name of the artist well known for impossible objects, like a castle’s stairs that appear to climb while leading you back around to where you started. I believe the artists did most of his work in the 1970s.
Do you mean Escher?
http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160909/c8c34ddb26da01efdbd267e8dfde5520.jpg
Yes, definitely M. C. Escher. Here’s another famous example of the impossible stairs motive. But really, everything by Escher is worth checking out. Here’s another weird, well, perspective.
Escher died in 1972.
There are other “impossible object” artists. See this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_object
That’s true, but I think that most of his cultural impact happened after his death, so it’s reasonable that many people became accustomed to his work during the seventies.
I was working on the possibility that our OP may not have been 100% on the details.
I’m not sure if this would work, but if you tilted the steps of each stair so that they were on an angle and each instep was at the same level, could you actually build them to “work”?
Escher started coming to popular attention when his art was used as the cover of Mott the Hoople’s first album in 1969. The album wasn’t a best seller, but it caught the eye of anyone paging through the record albums.
#/media/File:Mottthehoople1969.jpg){kind=link}
The Graphic Works of M. C. Escher was published in 1967, which introduced people to him, was published in 1967. By the time I was in college in 1970, it was pretty common to see on people’s bookshelves.
Hey, wow, I didn’t know that, though I know the drawing. And I heard it was a very good album, too. Unfortunately, it seems out of print even digitally, so to say.
ETA: Just saw that it’s in its entirety on youtube. One more for the queue ;-).
Escher must be the winner!