I was looking at matplotlib python inline on/off and this kind of solves the problem but when I do plt.ion() all of the Figures pop up (100s of figures). I want to keep them suppressed in a single cell. Is there a with loop I can use to turn off %matplotlib inline or is this impossible?

Figures closed before the end of the cell will not be shown. Calling plt.close("all") at the end of the cell will close all figures and none will be displayed in the cell's output.