make axes invisible or delete plot completely

Question

I have a matlab gui that shall contain 4 plots. The first plot shall be updated if a different file is selected in a list. the other 3 shall only be visible (and be calculated) on request.

However I fail to make plots 2-4 invisible after they have been plotted once.

I tried

set(handles.axesImage, 'Visible', 'off');

but that only deletes the axis, not the whole plot.

EDIT: Instead of making things unvisible, is it also possible to actually delele the content? Typically I would call close(hfig);, but here i have no figure.

I tried

handles2hide = [axisObj;cell2mat(get(axisObj,'Children'))]; 
delete(handles2hide);

But that fails for the unplotted axes (after startup)

EDIT: I changed the code to:

axisObj = handles.axesContour;
if ishandle(axisObj)
    handles2delete = get(axisObj,'Children');
    delete(handles2delete);
    set(axisObj,'visible','off') 
end
if (isfield(handles,'contour') && isfield(handles.contour,'hColorbar'))
    delete(handles.contour.hColorbar);
    delete(handles.contour.hColorbarLabel);
end

However the colorbar remains undeleted and handles.contour.hColorbar fails with Invalid handle object.

Answer 1

I now solved it with

function z_removePlots(handles)

if (isfield(handles,'image') && isfield(handles.image,'hplot'))
    if ishandle(handles.image.hplot)
        delete(handles.image.hplot);
        delete(findall(gcf,'tag','Colorbar'));
        handles.image.hplot = 0;
        set(handles.axesImage, 'Visible', 'off');
    end
end
if (isfield(handles,'contour') && isfield(handles.contour,'hplot'))
    if ishandle(handles.contour.hplot)
        delete(handles.contour.hplot);
        handles.contour.hplot = 0;
        ClearLinesFromAxes(handles.axesContour)
        set(handles.axesContour, 'Visible', 'off');
    end
end
guidata(handles.output,handles);

with

function ClearLinesFromAxes(axisObj)
if ishandle(axisObj)
    handles2delete = get(axisObj,'Children');
    delete(handles2delete);
end