Just as Poussin was Blunt's favourite painter of the past, so Picasso was his favourite living painter. And just as Blunt had called Blake both a traditionalist and a revolutionary, so he also said that Picasso, a very different kind of artist, "in addition to being a great revolutionary, is also a great traditionalist". Yet Blunt contradicted himself by stating that Picasso attempted "to create a new reality through the destruction of traditional forms". Blunt also tried to complete the circle and connect his favorite subjects. Focusing on Picasso's brief classical period in the early 1920s, Blunt made a daring leap from the 17th to the 20th century by claiming that Picasso was "essentially a calm, detached, intellectual artist, belonging to the tradition of Poussin, Ingres and Cézanne". It is significant that Blunt did not mention Poussin's most important follower, Jacques-Louis David. After trying to link Poussin and Picasso, Blunt called Guernica (1937) — whose central figures are a sacrificial horse and brutal bull — a modern Massacre of the Innocents: "Closer to Picasso in feeling, owing to its economy and concentration, is Poussin's Massacre at Chantilly, a painting which Picasso must certainly have known when he planned Guernica." In denying the evidence of the eye and arguing for the similarity of two disparate pictures, Blunt substituted bold assertion ("must certainly have known") for solid fact.

Blunt was on even shakier ground when trying to connect Picasso's Cubism of about 1910 to Poussin. In his book on Poussin and again without citing evidence Blunt claimed that Poussin (as if he were a late Turner) was a proto-abstract painter: "The early Cubists saw in him the near-abstract qualities which they themselves sought . . . The doctrines of the Cubists . . . are close to Poussin's ideas on art, and some of them claim descent from him through Cézanne." But John Richardson, the contemporary authority on Picasso, contradicts Blunt by stating, "Picasso has surprisingly little time for Cézanne's theorising [and said] ‘I'm in complete disagreement with his idea about making over Poussin in accordance with nature.' . . . He would not have wanted to lay himself open to a charge of Poussinism."

Picasso forced Blunt to confront the crisis of contemporary politics. Guernica was created during the Spanish Civil War. After the Nazis bombed the spiritual home of the Basque people, a ghastly event that unleashed destructive power against helpless humanity, Picasso painted his political protest in a week of white-hot fury. Writing in the Spectator of August 6, 1937, Blunt completely missed the artistic and political point: "The painting is disillusioning. Fundamentally it is the same as Picasso's bull-fight scenes. It is not an act of public mourning, but the expression of a private brain-storm which gives no evidence that Picasso has realised the political significance of Guernica." Blunt published short books on Picasso's sources in 1962 and on Guernica in 1969. In the second work, he was more interested in the sources and well-documented genesis of the painting than in the political meaning, and repeated his claim that "it would not be an exaggeration to describe Guernica as a Massacre of the Innocents". But Picasso's depiction of cruelty and horror were very similar to the engravings of Francisco Goya and of Poussin's contemporary Jacques Callot (1592-1635), neither mentioned by Blunt, and quite different from the work of Poussin.

To fortify himself and heal the fissure in his own subversive character, Blunt — deceptive in life and art — distorted the facts and denied the evidence. He identified with his various alter-egos, and exalted the qualities he sometimes lacked and most admired: Poussin's idealistic Stoicism and resignation in the face of adversity, Borromini's ruthless logic and intellectual control, Blake's defiance of authority and support of the Revolution, Picasso's imaginative transformations and political commitment.