From 1960 to 1967, Roberts wrote reviews of Manhattan gallery exhibitions for the highly respected Parisian journal Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. In addition, she contributed articles to France-Amérique and Art and Architecture, and was the author of two monographs, Mark Tobey (1960) and Louise Nevelson, Sculptor (1961). Her other book, Pocket Museum, was written in 1964. In 1960, Roberts received the Palmes Académiques award from the French government for her work as chair of the French section of the American Red Cross and was selected to become a writer-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. From 1952 to 1968, while working as an art critic and teaching a course at the university, Roberts continued to gain respect as gallery director of the Grand Central Moderns. She developed a reputation for giving a start to many unfashionable artists. One of them, Louise Nevelson, became a major international figure. Roberts first showed Nevelson’s work in the mid-1950s, alerting John Canaday, the New York Times art critic, to her great potential as a sculptor. Canaday wrote that Louise Nevelson “has become one of the best sculptors of our half of the century, a potential that Mrs. Roberts recognized.”

Roberts’s identification with France was lifelong. It was in the American Hospital in Paris on August 9, 1971, that Colette Roberts died of congestive heart failure.

The main focus of Roberts’s life was modern art. The success she earned as a gallery director, art critic, and educator influenced the art world of the mid-twentieth century in New York and Paris and throughout the world.