Sir Peter Blake, the pop art pioneer best known for his sleeve for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, has been excluded from a blockbuster exhibition about the movement’s legacy amid claims that he has fallen victim to “snobbery”.

Blake feels he has been repeatedly “sidelined” by the Tate galleries, a snub that his supporters put down to his populist appeal.

Opening in October, a new Tate Modern show in London will examine how artists in the 1980s and 1990s promoted their work with marketing techniques and the mass media. It will argue that Andy Warhol, who came to prominence by depicting consumer goods such as Campbell’s soup and with silkscreen portraits of the famous, is the pop artist with the greatest influence on later generations.

However, Blake’s 1967 album cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reached millions of homes and inspired countless imitations, establishing the artist as a pioneer in the mass distribution of graphic art. He went on to design record sleeves for the Who, the Band Aid charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas?, Paul Weller and Oasis.

When contacted by The Sunday Times, Blake, 76, said last week that he was not surprised by his omission from the Tate show. “They’ve hardly included me in anything they’ve done about pop art over the years,” he said.

“There were two or three rooms of pop art at Tate Britain some years ago that I wasn’t in. They had a recent hanging, British Pop Art in the Sixties, and I wasn’t in that either.”

Although Tate has not held a solo show devoted to Blake in London for 26 years, Tate Liverpool had a retrospective in 2007. “I’m very fond of Liverpool ,” said Blake. “But looking back, it was slightly sidelining me . . . it isn’t the same as having a retrospective in London.”

Marco Livingstone, a leading pop art historian, curator and author, said Blake’s work was very rarely shown at the Tate and that he deserved to be acknowledged with a permanent display of his paintings. “The art world often doesn’t fully appreciate what a serious artist he is. The fact that he’s so popular has probably worked against him. There’s a certain snobbery about it.”

A Tate spokeswoman said that its autumn exhibition Sold Out: The Artist in the Age of Pop would now be renamed The Artist in the Age of Publicity: From Warhol to Hirst.

The gallery said the show would examine a period and theme for which Blake was not relevant, but added: “Tate is very committed to exhibiting and supporting the important British pop artist Peter Blake, [whose] work is consistently shown.”

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